Even though ontology and virtual reality training (VRT) are subjects that have been explored in various areas over the years, there is an absence of a systematic approach that gives an overview on how both have been utilized together. We aim to explore how ontologies have been applied in VRT technology in recent times. Therefore, the systematic literature review methodology was carried out to collect studies between 2014 and 2021 from various databases. To summarize, the main findings of this research are as follows: (1) the majority of the studies concerns two roles, i.e., either capturing and structuring knowledge or separating domain knowledge and operational knowledge; (2) all ontologies apply deficient foundational ontologies, languages, and methodologies when developing ontologies for VRT; (3) there is a general lack of capturing perdurant knowledge in ontology design; and (4) there are key design elements that are considered crucial for designing an ontology for VRT. Further directions have been provided to contribute to the body of knowledge by recommending the right design elements that could produce idealistic and ubiquitous ontologies to facilitate VRT development throughout its life cycle.

In healthcare, the concept of virtual reality (VR) has already been around for decades. Virtual reality training (VRT) in ophthalmology, for example, has the potential to offer signiðcant levels of skills transfer to novice ophthalmic surgeons, improved patient safety, and surgical competency. However, VRT in this domain still lacks the ability of capturing training scenarios and learning contents (e.g., surgical contents) in an explicit manner. In this context, ontology arriving from artificial intelligence has become a backbone of VRT. Nowadays, there is an increasing concern towards approaches that apply ontologies as domain-driven conceptual models that help to explicitly represent the training scenario taking place in virtual environments (VE). Unfortunately, recent studies have reported that all designed ontologies for VRT in general areas apply deficient components of ontological engineering, specifically methodology. Therefore, it is a good pioneer initiative to establish a unified methodology and apply the best ontology design approaches.