Introduction

Extended reality (XR) technologies – encompassing virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and serious games – have emerged as powerful tools to enrich education and training. Over the past decade, Prof. Mariano Alcañiz and colleagues have been at the forefront of integrating XR into learning environments, pioneering approaches that blend pedagogical innovation with cutting-edge technology. These efforts span formal academic settings (from primary schools to engineering colleges) and informal or specialised training contexts (such as industrial assembly and neuropsychological assessment), all leveraging immersive media to enhance learning outcomes. This body of work has introduced interactive 3D content and game-based methodologies into traditional curricula, creating more engaging, ecologically valid learning experiences that often mirror real-world tasks more closely than conventional methods. In doing so, Prof. Alcañiz’s team has improved knowledge acquisition and skill training and redefined how success in education and training can be measured – shifting from static tests to dynamic, stealth assessments embedded within immersive activities. The following sections outline the scientific contributions of these efforts, as well as their novelty and impact on education and training.

Scientific Contribution

AR-Powered Learning Tools: One significant contribution is developing and validating AR-based educational tools to bolster students’ spatial abilities and understanding of complex concepts. For example, Prof. Alcañiz’s group introduced augmented books and toolkits for engineering graphics education, which allow students to visualise 3D models superimposed on textbook pages. In a controlled study, such an AR toolkit significantly improved engineering students’ 3D mental rotation and spatial reasoning skills, with pre- to post-test gains indicating a “significant and positive impact on students’ spatial abilities.” Likewise, using AR in the classroom has been shown to boost academic performance and student motivation. In one experiment, an AR-enhanced curriculum led to higher exam pass rates (80% vs. 50% in the control group) and more tremendous enthusiasm than traditional instruction. Beyond university settings, these AR interventions have been adapted for younger learners and other subjects. AR-based collaborative learning systems – such as an AR-enhanced tabletop for primary school math – enable multiple students to interact with virtual objects, fostering engagement and teamwork in problem-solving. By overlaying interactive visuals onto real environments, Prof. Alcañiz’s projects demonstrated that AR can turn abstract or complex topics into tangible learning experiences. This line of work also extended into vocational and industrial training; for instance, an AR system was developed to guide technicians through complex assembly tasks in the railway industry (the “Holorailway” project, 2024), illustrating how the same pedagogical innovations can transfer to on-the-job training. Collectively, these contributions show that AR technology can be harnessed to improve spatial cognition, reduce cognitive load, and promote active learning across a range of educational contexts.

Immersive VR for Engagement and Skill Training: Another key contribution lies in using fully immersive VR environments to captivate learners and enhance training effectiveness. Prof. Alcañiz’s team has designed serious virtual worlds and simulations aligned with curricular goals – essentially turning education into an interactive experience. In one early project, a children’s class learned science through a custom virtual world (the E-Junior project) that taught marine ecology via exploration and gameplay. When evaluated against a traditional classroom covering the same material, the VR approach achieved comparable learning outcomes yet markedly increased student enjoyment and engagement. Students in the virtual class reported being more interested and willing to participate than those in a conventional lesson, highlighting VR’s pedagogical value in motivation. Importantly, even when knowledge gains are similar, VR’s heightened enthusiasm and immersion can lead to deeper long-term retention and a more positive attitude toward learning. Prof. Alcañiz’s research also explored using VR to improve student attention and emotional state in educational settings. In one study, combining VR with relaxation techniques helped adolescents in a vocational program reduce stress and enhance focus during learning sessions. This demonstrates a novel use of VR for teaching content and preparing learners’ mental state (e.g., using a calming virtual environment to prime students for better attention). Furthermore, the team’s work in mobile VR has made immersive learning more accessible; by leveraging smartphone-based VR, they showed that even low-cost portable devices can deliver engaging educational content, potentially transforming how we learn and teach by enabling immersive lessons anywhere. Overall, these contributions leverage VR’s ability to create safe, controlled, yet lifelike scenarios – whether a virtual science lab, a historical reenactment, or a hazardous situation for emergency training – giving learners practical experience and interactive feedback that traditional classroom methods cannot easily provide.

Serious Games and Virtual Assessments: Prof. Alcañiz has been a pioneer in merging psychological assessment and training with game-based virtual environments. This approach blurs the line between learning and evaluation. His team developed a series of immersive serious games aimed at implicitly evaluating cognitive and behavioural skills, in contrast to formal exams or questionnaires. For instance, to study risk-taking tendencies (a relevant trait in fields from finance to health safety), they created a VR maze game (the “Spheres & Shield” task) where players face choices between safe vs. risky paths. Such a game dynamically measures decision-making under risk without the participant feeling “being tested.” The approach is rooted in virtual stealth assessment, wherein the gameplay generates metrics on the user’s decisions and reactions. By embedding assessments in this manner, the team improved ecological validity – the tasks resemble real-life decision scenarios far more than pen-and-paper tests, leading to more authentic behaviour. In the lab’s risk-taking game studies, VR metrics (e.g. which path was chosen, reaction times, hesitancy) along with physiological signals were used to profile individuals’ risk propensities (Similarly, the group has designed games to assess psychological needs and motivations unobtrusively, as well as executive functions like planning and impulse control via gamified daily activities (e.g. virtual cooking and shopping tasks). A notable contribution is the Virtual Cooking Task. In this immersive simulation, users must execute a recipe in a virtual kitchen designed to evaluate executive functions such as planning, working memory, and cognitive flexibility. By comparing performance in this VR task to standard neuropsychological tests, the team showed that the Virtual Cooking Task could sensitively detect deficits in clinical populations. For example, patients with alcohol use disorder made more errors and took longer in the VR cooking task than healthy individuals. The VR assessment also correlated with traditional test results, suggesting it captures the intended cognitive abilities but with the added benefit of realism. This provides “initial evidence that a more ecologically valid assessment can be a valuable tool to detect cognitive impairments…affecting daily activities.”). In sum, across these serious game initiatives, Prof. Alcañiz’s group contributed new methodologies to evaluate and train cognitive skills through engaging gameplay. These are pedagogical innovations because they transform assessments into learning opportunities (players receive feedback, adapt and improve within the game). They are technological innovations that exploit VR/AR capabilities – such as real-time motion tracking, eye tracking, and biosensors – to gather rich data on user performance.

Integration of Biometric Data and AI: Underlying many of the above contributions is a strong technological foundation: integrating biometric sensors and machine learning analytics into XR educational platforms. Prof. Alcañiz’s team has shown that immersive learning environments can double as scientific instruments that objectively record user responses. For example, in several projects, the team equipped learners with physiological sensors (recording heart rate, electrodermal activity, etc.) while they engaged in VR tasks. By doing so, they could measure hidden aspects of the learning experience – such as stress, emotional arousal, or cognitive workload – in real-time. One study reported that VR provides unique advantages for such monitoring, as it presents interactive, multisensory stimuli and allows accurate, synchronous recording of responses; in fact, the researchers note that modern VR setups with wearable sensors yield data that can be “more effective than self-reported measures” because they are unobtrusive and don’t rely on a student’s subjective assessment. These signals have been mined to derive insights like detecting when a learner is frustrated or when their attention lapses, enabling the possibility of adaptive systems that respond to the learner’s state. Moreover, Prof. Alcañiz’s group applied machine learning algorithms to the large datasets generated by these VR/AR learning sessions. In the context of risk behaviour, for instance, they used AI models to predict a user’s risk-taking profile from their pattern of choices and physiological reactions in the virtual maze. Likewise, in serious games for psychological assessment, they explored how algorithms can classify individuals or even make predictions (e.g., identifying students needing additional support) based on in-game behaviour. This infusion of data-driven analysis into educational technology exemplifies a technological innovation: it transforms immersive learning applications into intelligent systems that learn from the learner. The scientific contribution here is twofold – creating the systems that capture multimodal data in XR and validating that those data (e.g. galvanic skin responses, eye gaze, motion trajectories) have meaningful correlations with learning outcomes or psychological traits. By building these bridges between XR and biometrics, Prof. Alcañiz’s work has laid the groundwork for personalised learning environments that can adapt content in real-time and for new research methodologies in education science that rely on objective metrics rather than solely surveys or test scores.

Novelty and Impact

Prof. Alcañiz’s contributions represent a significant paradigm shift in how we approach education and training, driven by pedagogical and technological novelty. Pedagogically, this work breaks from the traditional one-size-fits-all lecture-and-test model by introducing interactive and learner-centered experiences. AR and VR make learning active and experiential: students are no longer passive recipients of information but active participants who manipulate virtual objects, navigate scenarios and learn by doing. This approach aligns with constructivist theories, but now technology enables it at a level of immersion and realism previously unattainable. The novelty is evident when comparing to earlier methods; for example, where a typical engineering graphics class might have relied on 2D drawings in a textbook, Alcañiz’s AR toolkit allowed students to see and touch 3D virtual models hovering over the page – a transformative leap in visualisation and understanding. Similarly, in psychology and skill training, instead of pen-and-paper quizzes or abstract puzzles, his serious games embed challenges in ecologically relevant contexts (like cooking a meal or exploring a virtual ecosystem), thus testing skills in a way that mirrors real-life applications. This represents a new paradigm of assessment-as-play, as exemplified by virtual stealth assessment. The impact of these pedagogical innovations has been documented in terms of improved learning metrics (e.g. higher test scores and skill gains with AR interventions and enhanced learner engagement and motivation (e.g. students finding lessons more enjoyable and being more willing to participate when delivered in a game-like virtual world. By demonstrating these benefits through rigorous studies, Prof. Alcañiz’s work has provided a blueprint for educators and trainers to harness XR for better outcomes, influencing numerous subsequent projects in educational technology.

From a technological standpoint, the contributions are equally groundbreaking. Introducing AR and VR into education in the late 2000s and 2010s was itself a bold step at a time when these technologies were not yet mainstream. To realise their vision, the team often had to develop custom hardware/software solutions (such as the AR_Dehaes toolkit and specialised VR scenarios). The novelty can be seen in how these systems surpassed prior educational tools: they enabled real-time interaction with content, multimodal sensory engagement (visual, auditory, and even haptic or olfactory in some cases), and continuous data capture of user performance. Traditional educational media could not achieve this richness. Moreover, Prof. Alcañiz’s integration of biosignals and AI into the learning process was ahead of its time – effectively turning immersive learning environments into intelligent environments. For example, measuring a student’s electrodermal (skin conductance) activity during a learning task was a novel idea that opened up new possibilities to understand emotional arousal and attention in situ. The research showed that these physiological indicators could reliably reflect user engagement or stress, providing objective feedback to instructors or adaptive algorithms. This is a significant departure from relying solely on questionnaires or observations. The impact of this technological innovation is multifaceted. On the one hand, it has advanced the field of learning analytics: educators and researchers now have new data streams to analyse learning processes, leading to data-informed improvements in instructional design. On the other hand, it laid the groundwork for personalised training systems – an idea hinted at in Prof. Alcañiz’s work where VR training could adjust difficulty based on the trainee’s biometrics in real-time, keeping them in an optimal learning zone. The XR platforms developed by his team also proved scalable and adaptable: what began as prototypes in laboratories (e.g., an AR app for a university course) have influenced real-world deployments, such as industry training programs using AR to reduce errors and improve efficiency in assembly tasks. Indeed, industries have started to adopt AR/VR for worker training, echoing the findings of Alcañiz’s academic studies that these tools can shorten learning curves and minimise mistakes by providing contextual, just-in-time guidance (as seen in the Holorailway AR system for railway assembly). The significance of these contributions is further underscored by how timely they became during global challenges. For instance, during the COVID-19 pandemic, immersive technologies and serious games gained attention as viable alternatives for remote learning and addressing mental health challenges. An editorial in 2021 highlighted VR/AR applications as promising avenues to mitigate pandemic-related disruptions. This trend builds on years of work by pioneers like Prof. Alcañiz in demonstrating the versatility of XR for education and training.

Across all these contributions, a unifying novel concept is that learning experiences can be both immersive and instrumented. Prof. Alcañiz’s introduction of rigorous measurement into engaging VR/AR tasks – treating user actions and reactions as data – stands out as a unique advance. Previous educational interventions rarely had such built-in assessment capability. In contrast, his XR-based frameworks show that one can simultaneously train and assess in a seamless loop. For example, a serious game can invisibly evaluate a trainee’s decision-making while they play and even adapt the scenario accordingly. This tight integration of training with evaluation (and even intervention) is a hallmark of novelty in his work. It has been noted that this approach provides “unique value in objectivity and adaptability” compared to earlier methods. The impact of this is evident in both research and practice. Researchers have gained new paradigms (e.g. using VR tasks as reliable proxies for real-world performance or psychological traits), and practitioners – teachers, psychologists, and job trainers – have gained new tools that are both effective and engaging. By validating these tools, the work has built confidence in XR’s role in education: what was once seen as experimental or entertainment technology is now regarded as a serious educational innovation. Notably, some of Prof. Alcañiz’s studies provided proof of concept that responses in a VR simulation (be it a student’s pattern of choices or a physiological stress spike) can serve as reliable indicators of learning or competence (Such evidence accelerates the acceptance of XR in high-stakes domains like medical training, safety certification, and neurorehabilitation, where accurate assessment is crucial. In summary, the novelty of these contributions lies in re-imagining both the content and the analytics of education – turning learning into an immersive, game-like activity and turning the learning environment into a sensor-rich, adaptive system – and the impact is a broad and growing adoption of these principles in modern educational technology.

Conclusion

Prof. Alcañiz’s work on XR in education and training has been transformative, showcasing how immersive technology can revolutionise learning, teaching, and evaluating skills. He has introduced innovative pedagogical strategies that make learning more engaging and tailored to the individual while pushing the technological envelope to make such a strategy feasible and practical. Through AR applications, he brought abstract concepts to life, dramatically improving students’ spatial understanding and knowledge retention. Through VR simulations and serious games, he opened new pathways for experiential learning, where users gain practical experience in virtual yet realistic settings – from performing scientific experiments in a virtual lab to practising emergency responses in a hazard simulation – without real-world consequences. As importantly, these virtual environments are assessment and research tools, capturing subtle behavioural and physiological data that provide deeper insight into the learning process. In doing so, Prof. Alcañiz has laid a foundation for a future of evidence-based, personalised education, wherein an AI-guided XR system could monitor a learner’s progress and adjust on the fly to optimise outcomes – a vision already foreshadowed by his adaptive prototypes. The degree of novelty and interdisciplinary integration (education, psychology, computer science) in his contributions has catalysed a shift in education and training. What was once unimaginable (e.g., a video game detecting cognitive impairment or an AR app being more effective than a textbook) is now a proven reality. Moving forward, these contributions inspire further developments such as more sophisticated multi-sensor immersive classrooms, broader studies on long-term learning transfer from VR to real life, and wider implementation of serious games in curricula and workforce training programs. In conclusion, Prof. Alcañiz has advanced state of the art in educational technology and exemplified how marrying immersive media with pedagogical design can yield quantifiable improvements in learning and skill development. His work has been seminal in turning XR into a catalyst for educational transformation – empowering learners, providing instructors with new capabilities, and ultimately helping to bridge the gap between learning experiences and real-world performance. Each of these contributions, from AR books to VR neuropsychology games, underscores a paradigm shift: education and training can be immersive, data-rich, and tailored in ways that were never before possible, heralding a new era of technology-enhanced learning.

Some related papers

Martín-Gutiérrez, J., Saorín, J. L., Contero, M., Alcañiz, M., Pérez-López, D. C., & Ortega, M. (2010). Design and validation of an augmented book for spatial abilities development in engineering students. Computers & Graphics, 34(1), 77-91.

Olmos, E., Cavalcanti, J. F., Soler, J. L., Contero, M., & Alcañiz, M. (2018). Mobile virtual reality: A promising technology to change how we learn and teach. Mobile and ubiquitous learning: An international handbook, 95-106.

Wrzesien, M., & Raya, M. A. (2010). Learning in serious virtual worlds: Evaluation of learning effectiveness and appeal to students in the E-Junior project. Computers & Education, 55(1), 178-187.

Gamberini, L., Alcaniz, M., Barresi, G., Fabregat-Cabrera, M. E., Ibanez, F., & Prontu, L. (2006). Cognition, technology and games for older people: An introduction to ELDERGAMES Project.

de-Juan-Ripoll, C., Chicchi Giglioli, I. A., Llanes-Jurado, J., Marín-Morales, J., & Alcañiz, M. (2021). Why do we take risks? Perception of the situation and risk proneness predicts domain-specific risk-taking—frontiers in psychology, 12, 562381.

de-Juan-Ripoll, C., Soler-Domínguez, J. L., Guixeres, J., Contero, M., Álvarez Gutiérrez, N., & Alcañiz, M. (2018). Virtual reality as a new approach for risk-taking assessment. Frontiers in psychology, 9, 2532.

de-Juan-Ripoll, C., Llanes-Jurado, J., Giglioli, I. A. C., Marín-Morales, J., & Alcañiz, M. (2021). An immersive virtual reality game for predicting risk-taking using implicit measures. Applied Sciences, 11(2), 825.

de-Juan-Ripoll, C., Soler-Domínguez, J. L., Chicchi Giglioli, I. A., Contero, M., & Alcaniz, M. (2020). The Spheres & Shield Maze task: a virtual reality serious game for assessing risk-taking in decision-making. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 23(11), 773-781.

Chicchi Giglioli, I. A., de Juan Ripoll, C., Parra, E., & Alcañiz Raya, M. (2021). Are 3D virtual environments better than 2D interfaces in serious game performance? An explorative study for the assessment of executive functions. Applied Neuropsychology: Adult, 28(2), 148-157.

Chicchi Giglioli, I. A., de Juan Ripoll, C., Parra, E., & Alcañiz Raya, M. (2018). EXPANSE: A novel narrative serious game for the behavioural assessment of cognitive abilities. PloS one, 13(11), e0206925.

Pallavicini, F., Chicchi Giglioli, I. A., Kim, G. J., Alcañiz, M., & Rizzo, A. (2021). Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and Video Games for Addressing the Impact of COVID-19 on Mental Health. Frontiers in Virtual Reality, 2, 719358.

Giglioli, I. A. C., Carrasco-Ribelles, L. A., Parra, E., Marín-Morales, J., & Alcañiz Raya, M. (2021). An immersive serious game for the behavioural assessment of psychological needs. Applied Sciences, 11(4), 1971.

Marín-Morales, J., Carrasco-Ribelles, L. A., Alcañiz, M., & Giglioli, I. A. C. (2021, April). Applying machine learning to a virtual serious game for neuropsychological assessment. In 2021 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON) (pp. 946-949). IEEE.

Chicchi Giglioli, I. A., Parra, E., Cardenas-Lopez, G., Riva, G., & Alcañiz Raya, M. (2017, November). Virtual stealth assessment: A new methodological approach for assessing psychological needs. In Joint International Conference on Serious Games (pp. 1-11). Cham: Springer International Publishing.

Chicchi Giglioli, I. A., Pérez Gálvez, B., Gil Granados, A., & Alcañiz Raya, M. (2021). The virtual cooking task: A preliminary comparison between neuropsychological and ecological virtual reality tests to assess executive function alterations in patients affected by alcohol use disorder. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 24(10), 673-682.

Chicchi Giglioli, I. A., Bermejo Vidal, C., & Alcañiz Raya, M. (2019). A virtual versus an augmented reality cooking task based-tools: a behavioural and physiological study on assessing executive functions. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 2529.

Torres, S. C., Gracia Laso, D. I., Minissi, M. E., Maddalon, L., Chicchi Giglioli, I. A., & Alcañiz, M. (2024). Social signal processing in affective virtual reality: human-shaped agents increase electrodermal activity in an elicited hostile environment. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 27(4), 268-274.

Martín-Gutiérrez, J., Contero, M., & Alcañiz, M. (2015). Augmented reality to train spatial skills. Procedia Computer Science, 77, 33-39.

Garcia, C., Ortega, M., Ivorra, E., Contero, M., Mora, P., & Alcañiz, M. L. (2024). Holorailway: an augmented reality system to support assembly operations in the railway industry. Advances in Manufacturing, 1-20.

Martín-Gutiérrez, J., Saorín, J. L., Contero, M., & Alcañiz, M. (2010, July). AR_Dehaes: an educational toolkit based on augmented reality technology for learning engineering graphics. In 2010 10th IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (pp. 133-137). IEEE.

Camba, J. D., Otey, J., Contero, M., & Alcañiz, M. (2012). Visualisation and Engineering Design Graphics with Augmented Reality. SDC Publications.

Soler-Domínguez, J. L., Contero, M., & Alcañiz, M. (2019). Workflow and tools to track and visualise behavioural data from a Virtual Reality environment using a lightweight GIS. SoftwareX, 10, 100269.

Salvador, G., Pérez, D., Ortega, M., Soto, E., Alcañiz, M., & Contero, M. (2012, May). Evaluation of an augmented reality enhanced tabletop system as a collaborative learning tool: A case study on mathematics at the primary school. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Conference of the European Association for Computer Graphics (Eurographics 2012), Cagliari, Italy (pp. 13-18).

Olmos, H., Gómez, S., Alcañiz, M., Contero, M., Andrés-Sebastiá, M. P., & Martín-Dorta, N. (2015). Combining Virtual Reality and Relaxation Techniques to Improve Attention Levels in Students from an Initial Vocational Qualification Program. In Design for Teaching and Learning in a Networked World: 10th European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning, EC-TEL 2015, Toledo, Spain, September 15-18, 2015, Proceedings 10 (pp. 613-616). Springer International Publishing.