The influence of virtual reality systems on walking behaviour: a toolset to support application design

Virtual Reality for walking rehabilitation is becoming increasingly common, but there are few guidelines in the literature to assist in application design. We present evidence from a series of empirical studies to demonstrate the effect of a number of factors within VR systems on walking and movement perception. Walking speed is differentially influenced by the type of walking interface, visual gain, and audio tempo. Walk ratio is altered by the walking interface and visual gain. Self-motion perception is affected by peripheral visual cues, field of view, contrast, geometry scaling and visual gain. Awareness of these effects supports the design of virtual reality applications which can optimise walking performance.