Digital learning has become an inevitable trend with many benefits for students' learning performance and motivation. However, Virtual Reality, a pervasive mode of digital learning nowadays, has incurred ambivalence among teachers over the years due to its high cost and other technical concerns. Panoramic image VR (PIVR) is a cost-efficient alternative to conventional VR in classroom settings, and is featured in this quasi-experimental research as a digital means to simulate language situations in future workplaces for a total of 106 vocational high school students majoring in auto mechanics. All student participants were divided into an experimental and a control group. The results showed that learning performance, motivation, and satisfaction were better in the experimental group than in the control group thanks to the use of PIVR. Furthermore, it was found that the learning performance of the experimental group students with medium prior knowledge was significantly better than that of the control group students of the same level of prior knowledge. However, no such difference was found for the remaining participants. It is thus inferred that PIVR-based digital learning might be more effective for students with medium prior knowledge than for those with either high or low prior knowledge.