Virtual Immersive Environments (VIEs) have the potential to greatly impact human learning by providing a rich and engaging learning experience that is interactive, immersive, and customizable. VIEs offer a unique opportunity to enhance learners' cognitive, social, and emotional engagement with the learning experience, leading to more effective and lasting learning outcomes. This section will explore how VIEs affect human learning and some key factors contributing to their impact.

The ability of VIEs to enhance learners' engagement and motivation is designed to be immersive and engaging, offering learners a sense of presence in the digital environment. This can be achieved through the use of realistic and interactive simulations, as well as the ability to customize the learning experience to the individual's interests and preferences. This sense of engagement can lead to increased motivation, leading to greater attention, effort, and persistence in learning (Carbonell-Carrera et al., 2021).

Another aspect of VIEs is their ability to provide a highly realistic and interactive learning experience. VIEs allow learners to interact with digital content in a way that closely mimics real-world scenarios, allowing for experiential and hands-on learning. This can be achieved through the use of simulation environments, virtual laboratories, and gamification elements, which can support problem-solving, experimentation, and exploration. The highly realistic and immersive nature of VIEs can also enhance learners' memory of the learning experience and promote the transfer of learning to real-world settings (Mütterlein & Hess, 2017)

An additional key factor in the effectiveness of VIEs is their ability to provide personalized and adaptive learning experiences. VIEs can be tailored to individual learners' specific needs, interests, and abilities, allowing for a highly customized and relevant learning experience. This is achieved through the use of analytics and tracking tools, which can monitor and analyze learners' progress, behavior, and preferences in real-time (Osadchyi, 2020).

Analytics and tracking tools are becoming increasingly important in VIEs to measure and analyze student performance, engagement, and learning outcomes. These tools enable instructors to monitor students' progress in real-time, identify areas where students struggle, and adjust their teaching strategies accordingly.

For example, eye-tracking devices can be used to identify optimal gaming environments that support cognitive development in two ways. First, eye tracking can be used to monitor participants' attention to channels through which cognitive feedback is conveyed. Cognitive feedback informs players about the consequences of their actions during gameplay and can influence learning outcomes. Second, eye movements provide evidence of engagement in cognitive processes. Longer fixation durations could indicate that participants are engaging in analysis and problem-solving, whereas shorter fixation durations suggest that participants might be glossing over the content. However, it remains impossible to determine comprehension based on eye-tracking data alone. To effectively deploy eye-tracking measures in VIEs, a list of generic behaviors that users/players engage in, such as navigation, needs to be delineated, and the associated cognitive processes must be identified and investigated further (Rappa et al., 2022).

Personalized learning in VIEs can also be enhanced through adaptive learning technologies, which can adjust the difficulty and pacing of learning activities to match the learners' abilities and preferences.

VIEs have the potential to greatly impact human learning by providing a highly engaging, realistic, and personalized learning experience. By enhancing learners' engagement and motivation, providing a realistic and interactive learning experience, and offering personalized and adaptive learning, VIEs can support more effective and lasting learning outcomes in various educational and training contexts.

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