Investigation of the effect of virtual reality on postural stability in healthy adults

Abstract

Previous research has shown that individuals behave differently in certain virtual reality tasks. The effect of VR on human posture and stability is an important factor that can influence the future applications of VR devices. This current study seeks to investigate how a person’s postural stability differs between VR and normal environment while attempting to replicate the influence of target distance on sway. Ten healthy subjects were tested in both environments with targets varying in distance. The results found a significant difference in postural stability for normal anatomical stance tasks between VR and normal environments.