Towards Enhanced Learning through Presence: A Systematic Review of Presence in Virtual Reality Across Tasks and Disciplines

TL;DR

This paper presents a PRISMA-guided systematic review of presence in VR learning environments, synthesizing 78 studies from 2020–2024 to map how spatial, social, co-presence, self-presence, and cognitive presence influence educational and collaborative tasks. It identifies core design factors—environmental fidelity, multimodal feedback, avatar/emotional expression, interface design, and biometric integration—that modulate presence and learning outcomes, and highlights both direct and indirect effects on engagement, collaboration, and cognitive load. The review offers practical design guidance for multi-sensory systems, adaptive feedback, avatar realism, and task designs that balance presence with cognitive demands, while acknowledging technical bottlenecks and ethical considerations. Overall, the findings underscore VR's potential to enhance education and teamwork through carefully crafted presence, with implications for future vertical deployments, standardization, and user-centered development.

Abstract

The rising interest in Virtual Reality (VR) technology has sparked a desire to create immersive learning platforms capable of handling various tasks across environments. Through immersive interfaces, users can engage deeply with virtual environments, enhancing both learning outcomes and task performance. In fields such as education, engineering, and collaboration, presence has emerged as a critical factor influencing user engagement, motivation, and skill mastery. This review provides a comprehensive examination of the role of presence across different tasks and disciplines, exploring how its design impacts learning outcomes. Using a systematic search strategy based on the PRISMA method, we screened 2,793 articles and included 78 studies that met our inclusion criteria. We conducted a detailed classification and analysis of different types of presence in VR environments, including spatial presence, social presence, co-presence, self-presence, and cognitive presence. This review emphasizes how these varied types of presence affect learning outcomes across tasks and fields, and examines how design elements and interaction techniques shape presence and subsequently impact learning outcomes. We also summarize trends and future directions, identifying research gaps and opportunities to improve learning outcomes by enhancing presence in VR environments, thus offering guidance and insight for future research on VR presence and learning effectiveness.

Figures (11)

• Figure 1: Systematic review process using PRISMA
• Figure 2: Articles per year (N=78)
• Figure 3: Frequency distribution of keywords in included articles.
• Figure 4: Statistics on the types of presence used in the studies (some studies involve multiple types of presence simultaneously.
• Figure 5: Statistics on the task types used in the studies.