Learning skills takes many forms, but arguably the most successful way is to learn by doing. When performing these skills requires expensive equipment or mock environments, we should look to virtual reality technology to aid in simulation instead. My goal with Optimized Learning with Virtual Reality was to gather evidence that using virtual reality helps people learn skills more effectively than alternatives, such as learning by watching video. The experiment that was designed to gather this data involved three procedures of varying difficulty which subjects would learn either by using virtual reality or by watching an instructional video, then their competency would be tested. Though IRB approval was not obtained in the time frame allocated for this project, and thus the experiment has yet to be performed, valuable revelations arose as I developed and tested virtual learning environments.