In 2019, a landmark study gave the immersive technology world an uncomfortable result: participants using a VR headset reported dramatically higher presence — but lower learning outcomes — than those on a desktop. The researchers published it anyway. It changed how serious practitioners think about this space. More than 30 years of research exists. The question isn't whether the evidence is there. It's whether we're reading it honestly.
"More immersive" doesn't automatically mean more learning
This is the finding practitioners most need to hear — and vendors least want to say. The 2019 Makransky, Terkildsen, and Mayer study compared a VR headset experience to the same content on a desktop. The VR condition produced dramatically higher presence. It also produced lower learning outcomes and higher cognitive load.
The finding wasn't a refutation of immersive learning. It was a clarification. When a rich sensory environment competes with the learning content for a visitor's attention, the environment wins — and the content loses.
Presence increase in VR vs. desktop (Makransky et al., 2019) — paired with lower learning outcomes. Immersion without instructional design is spectacle, not education.
The 2022 follow-up showed what changes the outcome: a well-designed virtual field trip produced both higher presence and higher learning — immediate retention (d = 0.61) and delayed recall (d = 0.70) — compared to 2D video. The difference was design, not technology.
Presence isn't a VR concept — it applies to every exhibit you already have
"Presence" is often treated as jargon for VR marketing. It's not. It's a rigorously defined psychological construct studied since 1980, with validated measurement instruments and meta-analyses across thousands of participants. And critically — it applies across the full spectrum of immersive formats.
Lombard and Ditton's 1997 landmark paper (over 4,000 citations) defined presence as the perceptual illusion of nonmediation — the feeling that the technology disappears and the environment becomes real. That happens in fulldome theatres, projection-mapped galleries, and well-crafted video environments. Not just headsets.
"Presence is a design variable, not a technology purchase. Every exhibit exists somewhere on the presence continuum."
For institutions that will never run HMD experiences, this matters enormously. The research applies to what you already have — and tells you how to make it work better.
The novelty effect is real — and it has well-documented solutions
Boards and funders rightly ask: does visitor excitement fade once the newness wears off? The honest answer is yes — novelty contributes to initial responses, and the research confirms it. But this concern is often used to dismiss immersive investment entirely, which misreads the evidence.
Novelty-driven engagement is still genuine engagement. A visitor who is excited to be in a new environment is in a better state for learning than one who is bored. The question is whether that engagement converts into meaningful outcomes — which returns us to instructional design.
The mitigation strategies are well-documented: pre-experience orientation, graduated introduction, and design for repeat engagement. A 2025 longitudinal study demonstrated that learning outcomes in VR environments improve as user familiarity grows. The novelty effect isn't a ceiling — it's a starting point.
Individual VR headsets work against how museums actually function
The dominant image of museum VR is a lone visitor in a headset, isolated from everyone around them. The research suggests this is also one of the format's genuine limitations — not because the technology doesn't work, but because it works against the social nature of museum learning.
Falk and Dierking's Contextual Model of Learning — validated with 217 adult visitors at a major science centre — identifies the sociocultural context as one of three overlapping drivers of museum learning. Exhibits that isolate visitors from one another are working against that grain.
Studies reviewed by Oh, Bailenson, and Welch (2018): more immersive displays generally produce higher social presence. Shared immersive formats have distinct advantages over isolating HMD experiences for museum settings.
Fulldome theatres and shared immersive cinema formats support 50 to 250+ visitors per session — inherently group experiences, aligned with how museum programming actually works.
Grant proposals that lead with technology are harder to fund than ones that lead with design
Granting agencies have grown sophisticated about immersive technology claims. Proposals that lead with hardware specs and novelty arguments are increasingly unsuccessful. Proposals that lead with evidence-based learning design frameworks are not.
The CAMIL model (Cognitive Affective Model of Immersive Learning), published in Educational Psychology Review in 2021, provides exactly the theoretical scaffolding funders respond to. It maps a clear pathway from technology features through presence and agency to measurable learning outcomes — and explains why design quality moderates the entire pathway.
"Immersive exhibits operationalise learning theories validated over decades — constructivism, experiential learning, embodied cognition — through the well-studied mechanism of presence."
NSF's AISL programme, IMLS Museums for America (over $23M awarded in FY2024), and NEH Digital Humanities grants all support immersive learning — but proposals that succeed frame technology as the delivery mechanism for sound pedagogy, not the main event.
The full research synthesis — free to cite
The Science of Presence brings together 30+ years of peer-reviewed research, 10+ meta-analyses, and the CAMIL model into a single resource built for museum and science centre professionals.
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