Suitable environments for XR training: balancing fidelity and authoring effort

Immersive training is one of the application areas of extended reality technologies that has attracted steady, and in some cases growing, interest over the years. Although immersive technologies for training have been considered promising since their early development, with a substantial body of scientific literature already emerging in the 1990s, only recently have the conditions appeared to be in place for their large-scale adoption. Several factors have historically limited the widespread diffusion of this training approach, including high authoring time, uncertain return on investment, and the lack of integration between new technological tools and appropriate learning methodologies. Among these factors, authoring time and effort have consistently been identified as major bottlenecks, underscoring the need for strategies specifically designed to address them. Any functional simulation developed for training purposes, whether in industrial contexts or other domains, relies on a core combination of geometric components and associated digital data. This information must be represented in a way that enables user interaction through a sensorial experience designed to support learning objectives, such as acquiring knowledge and procedures, developing new skills, and refining existing ones. For each intended learning outcome, it is therefore necessary to find a balance between the effort required to author the simulation and its level of realism, bearing in mind that simulation-based training is inherently multisensory and multimodal. This paper aims to provide a practitioner-oriented decision heuristic integrating established fidelity and transfer related principles with XR authoring effort and introduces a conceptual framework to support its application.