  Virtual Reality (VR) is rapidly increasing in popularity as a teaching tool.
It allows for the creation of a highly immersive, three-dimensional virtual
environment intended to simulate real-life environments. With more robots
saturating the industry - from manufacturing to healthcare, there is a need to
train end-users on how to set up, operate, tear down, and troubleshoot the
robot. Even though VR has become widely used in training surgeons on the
psychomotor skills associated with operating the robot, little research has
been done to see how the benefits of VR could translate to teaching the bedside
staff, tasked with supporting the robot during the full end-to-end surgical
procedure. We trained 30 participants on how to set up a robotic arm in an
environment mimicking clinical setup. We divided these participants equally
into 3 groups with one group trained with paper-based instructions, one with
video-based instructions and one with VR-based instructions. We then compared
and contrasted these three different training methods. VR and paper-based were
highly favored training mediums over video-based. VR-trained participants
achieved slightly higher fidelity of individual robotic joint angles,
suggesting better comprehension of the spatial awareness skills necessary to
achieve desired arm positioning. In addition, VR resulted in higher
reproducibility of setup fidelity and more consistency in user confidence
levels as compared to paper and video-based training.
