Investigating and acquiring motor expertise using virtual reality

After just months of simulated training, on January 19, 2019, a 23-year-old E-sports pro-gamer, Enzo Bonito, took to the racetrack and beat Lucas di Grassi, a Formula E and ex-Formula 1 driver with decades of real-world racing experience. This event raised the possibility that practicing in virtual reality can be surprisingly effective for acquiring motor expertise in real-world tasks. Here, we evaluate the potential of virtual reality to serve both as a space for training to expert levels in highly complex real-world tasks in compressed time windows at much lower financial cost without the hazards of the real world and as an experimental platform for exploring the science of expertise more generally.