# vIS: An Immersive Virtual Storytelling System for Vocational Training
## 1 Introduction  
Some of the most important factors behind a country's rising poverty and unemployment have been tied to the population's skill level and its ability to gain new skills in a changing technological landscape. The first response of policymakers to this has been to launch new vocational training initiatives to upgrade the skill level of the population, especially the youth [1, 2]. Employers invest an average of $3,000,000 per year into upgrading the skills of their workforce [3], mostly by assigning mentors to oversee training. Thus, the need for a cheap training replacement which offers the same level of training has recently become a key area of interest.  
To tackle this problem, researchers have worked extensively on producing innovative computer-based techniques to train and prepare workers for various positions in industry. We have seen a great increase in Human-Robot-Interaction (HRI)-based applications [4, 5, 6, 7] and Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR/VR) applications [8, 9] targeted towards teaching new skills, whether vocational or otherwise.  
While HRI and AR-based vocational training require a user to be physically present in the environment for which the training is curated, Virtual Reality on the other hand offers an entirely different experience in which a user can be completely immersed in a virtual simulation of the same environment. This immersivecapability of Virtual Reality systems have been found to enhance engagement [10; 11; 12] and cognitive capabilities, such as recall [13; 14; 15]. While such applications do succeed in imparting new skills [16], they fail in terms of providing the social and emotional interaction experience that comes from undertaking the same training in person and on-site.  
From a sociological viewpoint, there has been a widespread and growing need for and acceptance of interactive digital storytelling technologies [17; 18]. At its core, digital storytelling allows computer users to become creative storytellers through the traditional processes of selecting a topic, conducting research, writing a script and developing an interesting story. A story can be curated in the form of a personal narrative focusing on educational content.  
While much research has been conducted on using Virtual Reality-based training systems, none of them has explored the advantages of adding storytelling content to such systems to measure the impact on learning outcomes, user engagement and long-term recall. In this work, we present the Vocational Immersive Storytelling (vIS) system, a novel immersive virtual storytelling system for vocational training. We investigate the effectiveness of adding fictional story content inside an immersive virtual reality system that is designed to train users on how to use a micrometer--an advanced tool whose demand for skilled knowledge exceeds educational training [19]. We evaluate our system's capability to provide a training that is suitable for long-term recall in comparison to traditional methods of vocational training, text-based and video tutorial-based learning by conducting a two-phase user study of 30 participants spaced seven days apart. We also present the usability and user engagement metrics of our vIS system against the traditional methods of training.  
Our analysis shows that the participants of our vIS system performed slightly better than 2D video-tutorial participants, but outperformed the participants of a text-based training method in terms of long-term retention and recall regarding the use of a micrometer. Data collected from post-training questionnaires show a high system usability score (SUS) [20] of 76 for our vIS system, which indicates a high degree of satisfaction in using our system compared to other traditional methods.  
In the following sections, we present the relevant work in this context, describe the design of vIS in detail along with the design decisions behind the story content and then report the insights of our user study, which is followed by a discussion of our findings.