Questioning the use of virtual reality in the assessment of the physical impacts of real-task gestures and tasks

In the context of growing preoccupation about ergonomics and the minimizing of negative impacts of body movements performed during gestural interaction with a VR system, we implemented a gestural fatigue assessment system based on various standards and specifications. While our approach focused on VR, similar systems have been commercialized and propose to assess real-world gestural fatigue using a virtual reality environment. We wonder whether this is a valid approach, and use data collected by the system we have devised to appreciate fatigue due to a task completed both in a real-world environment as well as a VR environment. Participants were also asked to appreciate the fatigue they felt subjectively, thanks to questionnaires. We found that fatigue levels were higher in the virtual environment for almost all joints. Task duration was always higher in virtual reality environment. Furthermore, there seems to be no correlation between the automated objective results of fatigue assessment in the real-world and those obtained assessing the same tasks in a VR environment, thus questioning the validity of the transferability advocated by such systems. Correlation for subjective results is, however, high.