Balancing immersion and usability in virtual reality training: Effects on self-efficacy and user experience in mass casualty incident simulation

Abstract

Mass casualty incidents are high-risk situations that require rapid triage, prioritization, and coordinated decision-making under pressure. Virtual reality (VR) offers new opportunities to design immersive training environments for such contexts, but its effectiveness depends on the balance between immersion, usability, and cognitive demands. This exploratory study investigates how an immersive VR training system (SimTriage) influences perceived self-efficacy, user experience, presence, flow, and perceived workload of participants. Using a multi-method psychometric framework (SEP MCI, EduFlow2, UEQ, SUS, PSQ, NASA-TLX), data was collected from 20 participants. The preliminary results suggest an increase in participants’ perceived self-efficacy after the training experience, together with high levels of perceived presence, cognitive engagement, and positive user experience, while maintaining moderate workload. However, substantial inter-individual variability was observed in perceived self-efficacy gains. These exploratory findings suggest that the perceived effectiveness of immersive training environments depends less on immersion alone than on the alignment between interaction design, usability and workload management. This study contributes to human–computer interaction research by highlighting how experiential and usability factors jointly shape users’ perceptions of VR-based training systems. Future research should complement these subjective measures with objective indicators of learning and performance.