Virtual reality is now being used throughout various sectors. It is a tool which is being increasingly relied upon to support cost-effective and safe opportunities to build skills development. There has, however, been little research into whether a virtual environment provides the same effectiveness as a real-world environment.

For virtual reality to be an effective tool, we must better understand the impact of using it. To determine this, we investigate whether there is an additional cognitive load when operating in a virtual environment and we measure whether such a load impacts upon an individual’s performance.

Through the use of a ‘quadrant’ study in both real and virtual environments and with both the presence and absence of a secondary task, we identified that there is no significant cognitive load added when working within the virtual environment, and so the use of virtual reality can indeed be effective in terms of comparative performance with the real-world.

This research was conducted with approval of the Human Research Ethics Committee (Tasmania) Network; the reference number for the study is: H0018156.