Evaluating Interaction Cue Purpose and Timing for Learning and Retaining Virtual Reality Training

Interaction cues inform users about potential actions to take. Tutorials, games, educational systems, and training applications often employ interaction cues to direct users to take specific actions at particular moments. Prior studies have investigated many aspects of interaction cues, such as the feedforward and perceived affordances that often accompany them. However, two less-researched aspects of interaction cues include the effects of their purpose (i.e., the type of task conveyed) and their timing (i.e., when they are presented). In this paper, we present a study that evaluates the effects of interaction cue purpose and timing on performance while learning and retaining tasks with a virtual reality (VR) training application. Our results indicate that participants retained manipulation tasks significantly better than travel or selection tasks, despite both being significantly easier to complete than the manipulation tasks. Our results also indicate that immediate interaction cues afforded significantly faster learning and better retention than delayed interaction cues.