The competitiveness of XR training content is changing.
Until now, what mattered most in virtual reality and extended reality training content was often how real it looked. Developers created spaces similar to actual field sites, reproduced dangerous situations as scenarios, and allowed trainees to repeatedly practice response procedures in a safe environment.
This is why XR training has drawn attention in fields such as policing, firefighting, the military and industrial safety. In virtual environments, trainees can experience situations that are difficult to repeat in reality, or sometimes too dangerous to recreate at all.
But good training is not completed by visual realism alone.
What should a trainee see inside a virtual scene? What information should be recognized first? How should the next action be judged? Can the trainee understand how their action affected the situation? Does the system provide sufficient feedback during the training process?
If XR training cannot answer these questions, it may remain only a convincing simulation.
Professor Lee Sang-won’s research team at Yonsei University’s Digital Media Lab has focused precisely on this point. The team is conducting research to analyze and improve the user experience of existing XR police training content, viewing it not merely as a virtual scene, but as a training experience that must be designed around the user’s perception, judgment and action.
The next step for XR training is not simply more sophisticated graphics. It is user experience design that enables trainees to see, understand, judge and act as they would in the field.
XR-based education and training content is expanding quickly. In police training, XR can be used to simulate crime-scene response, dangerous-person control, civil complaint handling, field entry and crisis judgment. In firefighting, it can reproduce fire and disaster response. In the military, it can support tactical training and equipment operation. In industrial safety, it can simulate high-risk situations such as falls, explosions and fires.
The reason XR attracts attention is clear. It allows dangerous situations that are difficult to reproduce in reality to be repeated safely. It can reduce training cost and risk. It can provide the same situation repeatedly to multiple trainees. Most importantly, it can accumulate data on how trainees react and behave, giving XR possibilities that traditional training methods do not have.
However, the increase in XR training content and the establishment of training-quality standards are different issues. Until now, XR training has often been evaluated by realistic graphics, spatial reproduction, scenario realism, device performance and immersion. These elements are, of course, important. But in high-risk job training such as police training, there is an even more important question.
Can the trainee judge as if they were in the real field?
A police scene is not a place where officers simply perform fixed procedures. Multiple pieces of information arrive at the same time. Officers must consider danger signals, citizen reactions, the position of colleagues, legal procedures and safety conditions together. A split-second judgment can prevent excessive response or reduce risk. Therefore, XR police training should not be content that simply shows an incident. It should be an experience that trains judgment.
UX is often understood as the convenience of using an app or website. But in XR training, UX does not simply mean whether the menu is easy to use or whether the buttons are visible. UX in XR training means the entire experience through which a trainee perceives information inside a virtual environment, interprets the situation, chooses an action and understands the result.
Imagine a police training scenario in which a dangerous person appears. If the trainee recognizes the risk too late, the training becomes different from reality. If the system provides too much information in advance, the trainee loses the opportunity to judge independently. If feedback on the result of an action is insufficient, the trainee cannot know what was done well and what was missed.
In XR training, UX is directly connected to training effectiveness. If information is presented inappropriately, situational awareness is disrupted. If interaction feels awkward, the trainee focuses on the device rather than the field. If feedback is lacking, experience does not become learning. If the next action is unclear, it becomes difficult to build real response capability.
Good XR training does not end with immersion. It must allow the trainee to experience the thinking flow required in the real field. To address this challenge, Yonsei University’s Digital Media Lab developed UX heuristic principles for analyzing user experience in XR environments and applied them to existing XR police training content. Heuristic evaluation is a method of identifying problems that may occur while a user interacts with a system, based on a set of criteria. The research team adapted this method to the context of XR police training.
The focus of the analysis was the trainee’s experience flow. The team examined whether necessary information was provided at the right time, whether user actions received sufficient feedback, whether controls and interactions were intuitive, whether the next action could be clearly understood during training, whether changes in the situation were communicated naturally, and whether the trainee could understand the result of their own judgment.
If previous XR training mainly asked, “How similar is the space to the real field?” or “How realistic is the incident scenario?”, UX heuristics ask a different question: “How does the trainee experience that situation?” Even with the same space, the same incident and the same training goal, the training experience can change completely depending on information placement and feedback structure.
Based on the analysis, the research team improved the existing content. This was not done by adding a new scenario. Instead, the team redesigned the UX within the same training situation so that users could recognize necessary information more clearly and judge and act more naturally.
A key point in this study is that active-duty police officers directly participated in the evaluation. XR police training content cannot be properly assessed only from the perspective of researchers or developers. The awkwardness felt by officers with real field experience may be different from the inconvenience felt by ordinary users. Police work involves procedure, tension, risk perception, citizen response, cooperation with colleagues and legal judgment.
The research team had active-duty police officers experience both the original XR training content and the UX-improved content. In this process, issues more fundamental than simple control inconvenience were identified. The key questions were whether the way information was presented matched the flow of the real field, whether the process of understanding the situation felt natural, whether there were enough cues to support action decisions, whether system feedback helped the trainee’s judgment, and whether the incident flow inside the virtual environment connected with actual response experience.
The participation of active-duty police officers made the direction of content improvement more realistic. Training content should not be a system that looks good to developers. It should be an experience that helps real trainees build field response capability.
The evaluation of the improved content did not stop at asking whether it was simply “better.” The research team specifically examined which changes helped the actual training process. Could trainees identify necessary information more easily? Did the process of judging the next action feel more natural? Did system feedback help them understand the situation? Was the training flow interrupted by the burden of controlling the system? Could trainees more clearly recognize the result of their actions?
This process shows where the real core of XR training improvement lies. The quality of training content is not determined only by the number of scenarios or the level of graphics. Even in the same situation, the training effect can change depending on how information is arranged, when it is presented and what kind of feedback is given after user action. In this sense, UX improvement in XR training is not a minor usability fix. It is a core design method that enables trainees to judge as if they were in a real situation.
This study also changes how we think about realism in XR content. In XR training, realism has long been associated with visual fidelity. How precisely has the real space been reproduced? How natural do people and objects look? How immersive are the sound and movement? These questions still matter.
But in police training, realism is not completed by these elements alone. In the real field, officers must judge more than what is visible. They must anticipate danger, read the surrounding situation and consider procedure and safety at the same time. They must synthesize citizen reactions, colleague positions, distance, sound, objects and emotional changes. If XR training does not reflect this flow of judgment, the screen may look real while the training itself does not feel real.
Therefore, the sense of presence in XR training must expand to the next level. It must move from how real it looks to how realistically the trainee perceives, from how well the incident is reproduced to how effectively field judgment is induced, and from how immersive the environment feels to how well the experience guides behavior toward the training goal.
The success of XR training now depends not only on graphical realism, but on the realism of judgment experience. Police training is different from ordinary job training. If judgment is delayed or wrong in the field, both citizens and officers can be put at risk. Missing a danger signal can lead to a safety incident. Misunderstanding a situation can lead to excessive response. Missing a procedure can create legal problems. Poor communication can escalate conflict.
That is why UX in police XR training is not merely convenience. It is safety design. It supports the trainee’s attention allocation, situational awareness, quality of judgment, action selection and feedback-based learning. Good UX does not simply make training easier. It helps trainees think in a way similar to the real field. Necessary cues should be provided, but the system should not give away the answer. Feedback should be clear, but it should not break immersion during training. Controls should be intuitive, but they should not be disconnected from real action.
The research by Yonsei University’s Digital Media Lab is an attempt to systematically analyze this complex experience and turn it into criteria that can guide improvement. It also has implications beyond police training. XR content development is increasing in high-risk job training fields such as firefighting, the military, medical response, disaster response, aviation, nuclear power and manufacturing. These fields share one thing in common: situational judgment and action training are more important than simple knowledge acquisition.
Yet many XR training products still focus on realistic scene reproduction. They create realistic buildings, model equipment in 3D, insert accident scenarios and ask trainees to perform fixed procedures. This approach is useful for basic training, but advanced job training requires more. It must design the user’s perception, judgment and behavioral flow.
In the future, the competitiveness of the XR training market is likely to move from simple production capability to evaluation and improvement capability. It will not be enough to say which content is more immersive. Developers and institutions will need to explain which content improves real judgment capability. They will need to verify which feedback structures are effective for learning and which information-presentation methods help field response.
This study was conducted as part of the 2024 Culture, Sports and Tourism Research and Development Program supported by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and the Korea Creative Content Agency. The project is titled “Development of a Multimodal UX Evaluation Platform Technology for Optimizing XR Spatial Responsive Content,” with project number RS-2024-00361757.
At one time, XR and the metaverse were discussed mainly in terms of virtual spaces, avatars and immersive social experiences. But as the market matures, the practical use cases of XR are becoming clearer. One of them is training. Training fits XR’s strengths well. Dangerous situations can be reproduced safely. Repeated practice is possible. User behavior data can be collected. In fields such as policing, firefighting, the military and industrial safety, where real experience is important but risks and costs are high, XR can provide strong value.
But for XR training to settle into real educational environments, it must move beyond a simple technology demonstration. Wearing a headset and entering an immersive space is not enough. It must be clear what capability the trainee is developing, what judgment is being practiced and what behavioral feedback is being provided.
In this respect, the research by Yonsei University’s Digital Media Lab shows a practical direction for XR’s evolution. XR is no longer only a technology for showing. It is a technology for designing and evaluating training experience.
