Abstract

Virtual reality (VR) has become a common tool and is often considered for sport-specific purposes. Despite the increased usage, the transfer of VR-adapted skills into the real-world (RW) has not yet been sufficiently studied, and it is still unknown how much of the own body must be visible to complete motoric tasks within VR. In addition, it should be clarified whether older adults also need to perceive their body within VR scenarios to the same extent as younger people extending the usability. Therefore, younger (18–30 years old) and elderly adults (55 years and older) were tested (n = 42) performing a balance-, grasping- and throwing task in VR (HMD based) accompanied with different body visualization types in VR and in the RW having the regular visual input of body’s components. Comparing the performances between the age groups, the time for completion, the number of steps (balance task), the subjective estimation of difficulty, the number of errors, and a rating system revealing movements’ quality were considered as examined parameters. A one-way ANOVA/Friedmann with repeated measurements with factor [body visualization] was conducted to test the influence of varying body visualizations during task completion. Comparisons between the conditions [RW, VR] were performed using the t-Tests/Wilcoxon tests, and to compare both age groups [young, old], t-Tests for independent samples/Mann-Whitney-U-Test were used. The analyses of the effect of body visualization on performances showed a significant loss in movement’s quality when no body part was visualized (p < .05). This did not occur for the elderly adults, for which no influence of the body visualization on their performance could be proven. Comparing both age groups, the elderly adults performed significantly worse than the young age group in both conditions (p < .05). In VR, both groups showed longer times for completion, a higher rating of tasks’ difficulty in the balance and throwing task, and less performance quality in the grasping task. Overall, the results suggest using VR for the elderly with caution to the task demands, and the visualization of the body seemed less crucial for generating task completion. In summary, the actual task demands in VR could be successfully performed by elderly adults, even once one has to reckon with losses within movement’s quality. Although more different movements should be tested, basic elements are also realizable for elderly adults expanding possible areas of VR applications.

Highlights

  • Virtual reality (VR) has become a common tool to assess and treat health problems [1–3] due to the advantage of ecological validity, good experimental control, and many possibilities to track and analyze users’ behavior [4, 5]

  • Not confirming transfer effects could be caused by differences in visual perception of virtual environments like underestimating distances from egocentric perspectives [9], or incongruences between sensory and motor input occurring in VR might affect the performances [4, 10]

  • The results indicate that both young age groups performed all examined motoric tasks

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Summary

Introduction

Virtual reality (VR) has become a common tool to assess and treat health problems [1–3] due to the advantage of ecological validity, good experimental control, and many possibilities to track and analyze users’ behavior [4, 5]. Previously conducted studies showed minor differences between the visual perception in RW and VR, e.g., in eye-tracking [11], spatial orientation [12–14], as well as analyses of balance, grasping, and throwing performance accompanied with different body visualization types [15]. Those rare differences conclude that VR is suitable for training applications and sports science research. It is assumable that realistic conditions are provided in VR since the user can naturally walk within the VR scene (not restricted through a seated position and hand-held controller), resulting in movement executions that are close to those in RW In all those studies, only young and healthy adults were analyzed

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