Comparative Evaluation of Desktop, Room-Scale, and Large-Space Co-Located Collaborative Virtual Reality in Immersive Training.

Large-space co-located collaborative virtual reality provides a training environment in which participants can move, communicate, and coordinate actions within a shared immersive space. However, evidence remains limited on whether this configuration improves spatial presence, team coordination, and learning engagement beyond desktop-based collaboration or distributed room-scale virtual reality. This study evaluated a single-center, three-arm experimental protocol involving 126 participants assigned to 42 three-person teams. Teams were randomized to desktop collaborative simulation, room-scale distributed collaborative virtual reality, or large-space co-located collaborative virtual reality. All teams completed an 8-min orientation, a 20 min collaborative emergency logistics and spatial navigation task, immediate post-training assessments, and a 2-week retention test. Primary outcomes were spatial presence, self-rated team coordination, observer-rated team coordination, and learning engagement. Secondary outcomes included knowledge scores, cognitive load, simulator discomfort, and task-process indicators. The large-space co-located collaborative virtual reality group showed higher spatial presence, team coordination, and learning engagement than the comparison groups. Knowledge gain favored the large-space condition, whereas adjusted post-training knowledge and 2-week retention knowledge did not differ significantly across conditions. Cognitive load did not significantly increase, and simulator discomfort remained mild on average. These findings indicate that large-space co-located collaborative virtual reality may be most useful for training tasks that require spatial orientation, role-based coordination, and active team engagement, rather than for short-term knowledge acquisition alone.