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The purpose of virtual reality may allow us to give a definition of it. For Fuchs et al. (2006), its purpose is “to enable one person (or several) to engage in sensory-motor and cognitive activity in an artificial, digitally created world that may be imaginary, symbolic or a simulation of some aspect of the real world” (p. 5).

User activity is described as sensory-motor and cognitive activity. We speak of sensory-motor activity because, on one hand, the user, in his/her interaction with virtual reality, perceives the virtual world and virtual entities through different senses (sight, hearing, proprioception, etc.) and, on the other hand, he/she acts physically within the world in which he/she is immersed. His/her activity is also cognitive, since he/she processes the information he/she perceives, memorizes it, makes decisions and undertakes actions. Note that there are perception–cognition feedback loops: a stimulus given by the computer part of virtual reality can lead to a motor action by the user, which in turn leads to new sensory stimuli that modify the user’s intentions.

The second part of the definition mentions different types of virtual environments; they can be imaginary, symbolic or they can be simulations of certain aspects of the real world. Imaginary virtual environments are common in video games, where the aim is to immerse the player in a world different from their own. Other virtual environments represent symbolic worlds, in the sense that they materialize elements of the real world that are not always perceptible to humans. For example, they offer the possibility of manipulating DNA (Lamb et al. 2018). Finally, virtual reality is misrepresented as a pale copy of the real world, which it seeks to reproduce as closely as possible. However, the purpose of virtual reality, when it represents the physical world, is to exploit aspects of it for different purposes. For this reason, some virtual environments are considered to be “simulations of some aspects of the real world”. For example, in a project review, a virtual environment can accurately represent the product you wish to evaluate, such as a machine. It is not necessarily interesting to represent the noises of the workshop, the routes of the parts supply trolleys or the neighboring stations in detail.