Virtual Reality Task Research Articles

Assessing the Effect of Training on the Cognition and Brain of Older Adults: Protocol for a Three-Arm Randomized Double-Blind Controlled Trial (ACTOP).

BackgroundTo prevent age-related cognitive impairment, many intervention programs offer exercises targeting different central cognitive processes. However, the effects of different process-based training programs are rarely compared within equivalent experimental designs.ObjectiveUsing a randomized double-blind controlled trial, this project aims to examine and compare the impact of 2 process-based interventions, inhibition and updating, on the cognition and brain of older adults.MethodsA total of 90 healthy older adults were randomly assigned to 1 of 3 training conditions: (1) inhibition (Stroop-like exercises), (2) updating (N-back-type exercises), and (3) control active (quiz game exercise). Training was provided in 12 half-hour sessions over 4 weeks. First, the performance gain observed will be measured on the trained tasks. We will then determine the extent of transfer of gain on (1) untrained tasks that rely on the same cognitive process, (2) complex working memory (WM) measurements hypothesized to involve 1 of the 2 trained processes, and (3) virtual reality tasks that were designed to mimic real-life situations that require WM. We will assess whether training increases cortical volume given that the volume of the cortex is determined by cortical area and thickness in regions known to be involved in WM or changes task-related brain activation patterns measured with functional magnetic resonance imaging. Dose effects will be examined by measuring outcomes at different time points during training. We will also determine whether individual characteristics moderate the effect of training on cognitive and cerebral outcomes. Finally, we will evaluate whether training reduces the age-related deficit on transfer and brain outcomes, by comparing study participants to a group of 30 younger adults.ResultsThe project was funded in January 2017; enrollment began in October 2017 and data collection was completed in April 2019. Data analysis has begun in June 2020 and the first results should be published by the end of 2020 or early 2021.ConclusionsThe results of this study will help understand the relative efficacy of 2 attentional control interventions on the cognition and the brain of older adults, as well as the moderating role of individual characteristics on training efficiency and transfer.Trial RegistrationClinicalTrials.gov NCT03532113; https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT03532113International Registered Report Identifier (IRRID)DERR1-10.2196/20430

The impact of hand movement velocity on cognitive conflict processing in a 3D object selection task in virtual reality

Detecting and correcting incorrect body movements is an essential part of everyday interaction with one's environment. The human brain provides a monitoring system that constantly controls and adjusts our actions according to our surroundings. However, when our brain's predictions about a planned action do not match the sensory inputs resulting from that action, cognitive conflict occurs. Much is known about cognitive conflict in 1D/2D environments; however, less is known about the role of movement characteristics associated with cognitive conflict in 3D environment. Hence, we devised an object selection task in a virtual reality (VR) environment to test how the velocity of hand movements impacts human brain responses. From a series of analyses of EEG recordings synchronized with motion capture, we found that the velocity of the participants’ hand movements modulated the brain's response to proprioceptive feedback during the task and induced a prediction error negativity (PEN). Additionally, the PEN originates in the anterior cingulate cortex and is itself modulated by the ballistic phase of the hand's movement. These findings suggest that velocity is an essential component of integrating hand movements with visual and proprioceptive information during interactions with real and virtual objects.

Spatial orientation tasks show moderate to high accuracy for the diagnosis of mild cognitive impairment: a systematic literature review.

Spatial disorientation has been observed in mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and is associated with a higher risk of progression to Alzheimer's disease (AD). However, there is no gold standard assessment for spatial orientation and paper-and-pencil tests lack ecological validity. Recently, there has been an increasing number of studies demonstrating the role of spatial disorientation as a cognitive marker of pathological decline, shedding new light on its importance for MCI. This systematic review aimed to investigate the accuracy of spatial orientation tasks for the diagnosis of MCI by comparison with cognitively healthy elderly. The search was conducted in the databases Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online (MEDLINE/PubMed), Web of Science, Scopus, Excerpta Medica Database (Embase), Literatura Latino-Americana e do Caribe em Ciências da Saúde (Lilacs) and Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO). Only original studies reporting spatial orientation assessment in MCI patients compared to a healthy control group were included. Studies were excluded if the MCI classification did not follow well described criteria and/or if accuracy results of spatial orientation assessment were not provided. Seven studies met the eligibility criteria, describing a variety of spatial orientation assessments including questionnaires, paper-and-pencil, office-based route learning, and computer-based and virtual reality tasks. Spatial orientation tasks demonstrated moderate to high accuracy in detecting elderly with MCI compared to cognitively healthy elderly, with areas under the curve (AUC) ranging from 0.77 to 0.99. However, important methodological issues were found in the selected studies which should be considered when interpreting results. Although the inclusion of spatial orientation assessments in MCI evaluations seems to have significant value, further studies are needed to clarify their true capacity to distinguish pathological from non-pathological aging.

A Fitts’ Law Evaluation of Visuo-haptic Fidelity and Sensory Mismatch on User Performance in a Near-field Disc Transfer Task in Virtual Reality

The trade-off between speed and accuracy in precision tasks is important to evaluate during user interaction with input devices. When different sensory cues are added or altered in such interactions, those cues have an effect on this trade-off, and thus, they affect overall user performance. For instance, adding cues like haptic feedback and stereoscopic viewing will result in more realistic user interaction, thus improving performance in these tasks. Also, adding a noticeable disparity between physical and virtual movements creates a mismatch between visual and proprioceptive systems, which generally has a negative effect on performance. In this study, we investigate the effects of haptic feedback, stereoscopic viewing, and visuo-proprioceptive mismatch on how quickly and accurately users complete a virtual pick-and-place task using the PHANToM OMNI. Through this experiment, we find that in the movement phase of a ring transfer, movement time and user performance are affected by haptic feedback and visuo-proprioceptive mismatch, and the main effects of stereoscopic viewing appears to be limited to the more precise step when the ring is around the target peg.

Use of Virtual Reality to Educate Undergraduate Medical Students on Cardiac Peripheral and Collateral Circulation.

Many medical schools are looking to utilize virtual reality (VR); however, due to its novelty, we know little about how VR can be effectively used in medical education. This study evaluates a case-centered VR task that supported students with learning peripheral and collateral circulation, anatomical features that are not easily observed in cadavers. Data sources included a quiz, survey, and focus group. Based on quantitative and qualitative analyses, we support the claim that this activity was an effective use of VR and identify features that made it effective, which can guide other educators who are interested in developing VR activities.

Familiarity with teammate's attitudes improves team performance in virtual reality.

Virtual reality (VR) is a potentially challenging social environment for effective communication and collaboration. Thus, we conducted a VR study to determine whether increased familiarity with a teammate would improve performance on a joint decision making task. Specifically, because attitude familiarity, or knowledge of another person’s attitudes, has been correlated with better relationship functioning in the past, we anticipated that team performance would improve when teammates were first asked to discuss their task-relevant attitudes with one another. We also hypothesized that increased familiarity would be particularly useful in immersive VR, where typical social and other nonverbal cues were lacking. Twenty pairs recruited from a workplace environment were randomly assigned to either the Familiar or Control condition before completing a joint decision making task both in VR and on desktop monitors. The manipulation of attitude familiarity was successful: pairs in the Familiar condition were significantly more aware of their partners’ unique task-relevant attitudes. Results found that in VR, Familiar pairs were more accurate at determining patterns to events. Additionally, for teams less experienced in VR, Familiar pairs were also more accurate at predicting future events. However, there was no meaningful statistical difference in pairs’ ability to identify information. Familiar teams also took more time to answer questions, and we found no difference in self-reported communication quality. Overall, this was the first successful manipulation of attitude familiarity and results indicate that such an intervention may prove useful in a collaborative work environment, as Familiar teams demonstrated greater accuracy, especially in VR.

Differential Relation between Neuronal and Behavioral Discrimination during Hippocampal Memory Encoding

SummaryHow are distinct memories formed and used for behavior? To relate neuronal and behavioral discrimination during memory formation, we use in vivo 2-photon Ca2+ imaging and whole-cell recordings from hippocampal subregions in head-fixed mice performing a spatial virtual reality task. We find that subthreshold activity as well as population codes of dentate gyrus neurons robustly discriminate across different spatial environments, whereas neuronal remapping in CA1 depends on the degree of difference between visual cues. Moreover, neuronal discrimination in CA1, but not in the dentate gyrus, reflects behavioral performance. Our results suggest that CA1 weights the decorrelated information from the dentate gyrus according to its relevance, producing a map of memory representations that can be used by downstream circuits to guide learning and behavior.

Motor learning through a non-immersive virtual task in people with limb-girdle muscular dystrophies

Introduction: Limb-girdle muscular dystrophies (LGMDs) are neuromuscular and genetic disorders that progress with weakness and damage of the proximal muscles, developing with loss of functionality. Virtual reality environments are suggested as an effective alternative for performance of daily life activities. However, there is no evidence in the literature on the use of virtual reality in this population. Objective: Assess motor performance through a motor learning protocol in a coincident timing task. Methods: 10 participants with LGMD and 10 healthy individuals were selected and included in the study to perform a non-immersive virtual reality task divided into three phases: acquisition (20 attempts), retention (5 attempts), and transfer (5 attempts, with speed increase). Results: It is observed that the accuracy of movement improves from the beginning to the end of the acquisition (p = 0.01); however, there is a marginal difference between the groups in block A1 (p = 0.089). Regarding the variability of touches, observed by the variable error, both groups improved performance in all phases. Conclusion: Even with lower performance than the control group at the beginning of the practice, individuals with LGMD showed the potential to optimize motor function during the practice of a non-immersive virtual reality activity and were able to match their performance with the control group after a few attempts.

Effects of body visualization on performance in head-mounted display virtual reality.

Although there are many virtual reality (VR) applications in sports, only a handful of studies visualized the whole body. There is still a lack of understanding, how much of the own body must be visualized in the head-mounted display (HMD) based VR, to ensure fidelity and similar performance outcome as in the real-world. In the current study, 20 young and healthy participants completed three tasks in a real and virtual environment: balance task, grasping task, and throwing task with a ball. The aim was to find out the meaning of the visualization of different body parts for the quality of movement execution and to derive future guidelines for virtual body presentation. In addition, a comparison of human performance between reality and VR, with whole-body visualization was made. Focusing on the main goal of the current study, there were differences within the measured parameters due to the visualization of different body parts. In the balance task, the differences within the VR body visualization consisted mainly through no-body visualization (NB) compared to the other visualization types defined as whole-body (WB), WB except feet (NF), as well as WB except feet and legs (NLF). In the grasping task, the different body visualization seemed to have no impact on the participants’ performances. In the throwing task, the whole-body visualization led to higher accuracy compared to the other visualization types. Regarding the comparison between the conditions, we found significant differences between reality and VR, which had a large effect on the parameters time for completion in the balance and grasping task, the number of foot strikes on the beam in the balance task, as well as the subjective estimation of the difficulty for all tasks. However, the number of errors and the quality of the performances did not differ significantly. The current study was the first study comparing sports-related tasks in VR and reality with further manipulations (occlusions of body parts) of the virtual body. For studies analyzing perception and sports performance or for VR sports interventions, we recommend the visualization of the whole body in real-time.

Alteration of brain dynamics during dual‐task overground walking

When walking in our natural environment, we often solve additional cognitive tasks. This increases the demand of resources needed for both the cognitive and motor systems, resulting in Cognitive-Motor Interference (CMI). A large portion of neurophysiological investigations on CMI took place in static settings, emphasizing the experimental rigor but overshadowing the ecological validity. As a more ecologically valid alternative to treadmill and desktop-based setups to investigate CMI, we developed a dual-task walking scenario in virtual reality (VR) combined with Mobile Brain/Body Imaging (MoBI). We aimed at investigating how brain dynamics are modulated by dual-task overground walking with an additional task in the visual domain. Participants performed a visual discrimination task in VR while standing (single-task) and walking overground (dual-task). Even though walking had no impact on the performance in the visual discrimination task, a P3 amplitude reduction along with changes in power spectral densities (PSDs) were observed for discriminating visual stimuli during dual-task walking. These results reflect an impact of walking on the parallel processing of visual stimuli even when the cognitive task is particularly easy. This standardized and easy to modify VR paradigm helps to systematically study CMI, allowing researchers to control for the impact of additional task complexity of tasks in different sensory modalities. Future investigations implementing an improved virtual design with more challenging cognitive and motor tasks will have to investigate the roles of both cognition and motion, allowing for a better understanding of the functional architecture of attention reallocation between cognitive and motor systems during active behavior.

First-person body view modulates the neural substrates of episodic memory and autonoetic consciousness: A functional connectivity study

Episodic memory (EM) is classically conceived as a memory for events, localized in space and time, and characterized by autonoetic consciousness (ANC) allowing to mentally travel back in time and subjectively relive an event. Building on recent evidence that the first-person visual co-perception of one's own body during encoding impacts EM, we used a scene recognition task in immersive virtual reality (VR) and measured how first-person body view would modulate peri-encoding resting-state fMRI, EM performance, and ANC. Specifically, we investigated the impact of body view on post-encoding functional connectivity in an a priori network of regions related either to EM or multisensory bodily processing and used these regions in a seed-to-whole brain analysis. Post-encoding connectivity between right hippocampus (rHC) and right parahippocampus (rPHC) was enhanced when participants encoded scenes while seeing their body. Moreover, the strength of connectivity between the rHC, rPHC and the neocortex displayed two main patterns with respect to body view. The connectivity with a sensorimotor fronto-parietal network, comprising primary somatosensory and primary motor cortices, correlated with ANC after - but not before - encoding, depending on body view. The opposite change of connectivity was found between rHC, rPHC and the medial parietal cortex (from being correlated with ANC before encoding to an absence of correlation after encoding), but irrespective of body view. Linking immersive VR and fMRI for the study of EM and ANC, these findings suggest that seeing one's own body during encoding impacts the brain activity related to EM formation by modulating the connectivity between the right hippocampal formation and the neocortical regions involved in the processing of multisensory bodily signals and self-consciousness.

Effect of Combined Therapy of Virtual Reality and Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation in Children and Adolescents With Cerebral Palsy: A Study Protocol for a Triple-Blinded Randomized Controlled Crossover Trial.

Background: Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) and therapy-based virtual reality (VR) have been investigated separately. They have shown promise as efficient and engaging new tools in the neurological rehabilitation of individuals with cerebral palsy (CP). However, the recent literature encourages investigation of the combination of therapy tools in order to potentiate clinic effects and its mechanisms.Methods: A triple-blinded randomised sham-controlled crossover trial will be performed. Thirty-six individuals with gross motor function of levels I to IV (aged 4–14 years old) will be recruited. Individuals will be randomly assigned to Group A (active first) or S (sham first): Group A will start with ten sessions of active tDSC combined with VR tasks. After a 1-month washout, this group will be reallocated to another ten sessions with sham tDCS combined with VR tasks. In contrast, Group S will carry out the opposite protocol, starting with sham tDCS. For the active tDCS the protocol will use low frequency tDCS [intensity of 1 milliampere (mA)] over the primary cortex (M1) area on the dominant side of the brain. Clinical evaluations (reaction times and coincident timing through VR, functional scales: Abilhand-Kids, ACTIVLIM-CP, Paediatric Evaluation of Disability Inventory-PEDI- and heart rate variability-HRV) will be performed at baseline, during, and after active and sham tDCS.Conclusion: tDCS has produced positive results in treating individuals with CP; thus, its combination with new technologies shows promise as a potential mechanism for improving neurological functioning. The results of this study may provide new insights into motor rehabilitation, thereby contributing to the better use of combined tDCS and VR in people with CP.Trial Registration: ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT04044677. Registered on 05 August 2019.

Adding Haptic Feedback to Virtual Environments With a Cable-Driven Robot Improves Upper Limb Spatio-Temporal Parameters During a Manual Handling Task.

Physical interactions within virtual environments are often limited to visual information within a restricted workspace. A new system exploiting a cable-driven parallel robot to combine visual and haptic information related to environmental physical constraints (e.g. shelving, object weight) was developed. The aim of this study was to evaluate the impact on user movement patterns of adding haptic feedback in a virtual environment with this robot. Twelve healthy participants executed a manual handling task under three conditions: 1) in a virtual environment with haptic feedback; 2) in a virtual environment without haptic feedback; 3) in a real physical environment. Temporal parameters (movement time, peak velocity, movement smoothness, time to maximum flexion, time to peak wrist velocity) and spatial parameters of movement (maximum trunk flexion, range of motion of the trunk, length of the trajectory, index of curvature and maximum clearance from the shelf) were analysed during the reaching, lowering and lifting phases. Our results suggest that adding haptic feedback improves spatial parameters of movement to better respect the environmental constraints. However, the visual information presented in the virtual environment through the head mounted display appears to have an impact on temporal parameters of movement leading to greater movement time. Taken together, our results suggest that a cable-driven robot can be a promising device to provide a more ecological context during complex tasks in virtual reality.

Comparing Collaboration Fidelity between VR, MR and Video Conferencing Systems: The Effects of Visual Communication Media Fidelity on Collaboration

Video/audio conferencing systems have been used extensively for remote collaboration over many years. Recently, virtual and mixed reality (VR/MR) systems have started to show great potential as communication media for remote collaboration. Prior studies revealed that the creation of common ground between discourse participants is crucial for collaboration and that grounding techniques change with the communication medium. However, it is difficult to find previous research that compares VR and MR communication system performances with video conferencing systems regarding the creation of common ground for collaborative problem solving. On the other hand, prior studies have found that display fidelity and interaction fidelity had significant effects on performance-intensive individual tasks in virtual reality. Fidelity in VR can be defined as the degree of objective accuracy with which the real-world is represented by the virtual world. However, to date, fidelity for collaborative tasks in VR/MR has not been defined or studied much. In this paper, we compare five different communication media for the establishment of common ground in collaborative problem-solving tasks: Webcam, headband camera, VR, MR, and audio-only conferencing systems. We analyzed these communication media with respect to collaborative fidelity components which we defined. For the experiments, we utilized two different types of collaborative tasks: a 2D Tangram puzzle and a 3D Soma cube puzzle. The experimental results show that the traditional Webcam performed better than the other media in the 2D task, while the headband camera performed better in the 3D task. In terms of collaboration fidelity, these results were somehow predictable, although there was a little difference between our expectations and the results.

A-183 A Preliminary Study of Comfort with Computers and Analog Tasks in Relation to Older Adults’ Performance in Virtual Reality

Abstract Objective Neuropsychologists are using virtual reality to simulate everyday activities in order to increase ecological validity in neuropsychological assessments (Kane & Parsons, 2017). However, relatively little is known about the extent to which comfort with computers and analog tasks influences older adults’ performance on virtual reality-based tasks. Methods Healthy older adults (N = 42) rated how comfortable they are with computers and cooking meals in daily life and completed the Virtual Kitchen Protocol, a measure of procedural learning and memory for meal preparation tasks. Results Both higher comfort with cooking meals in a real kitchen and higher comfort with computers were associated with better learning, immediate recall, and delayed recall of the procedural task in virtual reality. However, comfort with computers did not explain a significant amount of variance in performance beyond comfort cooking in a real kitchen. Conclusion While both comfort with computers and analog versions of tasks may relate to older adults’ learning and memory in virtual reality, performance may be primarily related to analog abilities.

A-028 Utilizing Virtual Reality to Assess the Relationship between Prospective Memory and Processing Speed

Abstract Objective Processing speed may partially mediate age-related differences in prospective memory (PM) abilities (West & Craik, 2001). The present preliminary study aimed to further investigate the relationships between prospective memory and processing speed by utilizing a novel virtual reality-based prospective memory measure. The task was designed to assess the impacts of a virtual environment would facilitate a deeper level of processing and enhance prospective memory performance. Method 49 older adults (M = 73.87, SD = 8.24) and 39 younger adults(M = 18.87, SD =1.61) completed the Coding subtest of the Weschler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS- IV) as well as a virtual-reality prospective memory measure that utilized both time-based and event-based cues. Results Coding was strongly correlated with PM time-based cues (r = .43, p < .01) and event-based cues (r = .53, p < .001). There were no correlations between processing speed and prospective memory in the young adult sample. Conclusion This study suggests that processing speed is strongly related to virtual-reality based PM and suggests that processing speed is a crucial component in prospective memory outcomes in older adults. This novel task virtual reality task may provide construct validity against other prospective memory measures.

User Experience of Interactive Technologies for People With Dementia: Comparative Observational Study.

BackgroundSerious games (SGs) are used as complementary approaches to stimulate patients with dementia. However, many of the SGs use out-of-the-shelf technologies that may not always be suitable for such populations, as they can lead to negative behaviors, such as anxiety, fatigue, and even cybersickness.ObjectiveThis study aims to evaluate how patients with dementia interact and accept 5 out-of-the-shelf technologies while completing 10 virtual reality tasks.MethodsA total of 12 participants diagnosed with dementia (mean age 75.08 [SD 8.07] years, mean Mini-Mental State Examination score 17.33 [SD 5.79], and mean schooling 5.55 [SD 3.30]) at a health care center in Portugal were invited to participate in this study. A within-subject experimental design was used to allow all participants to interact with all technologies, such as HTC VIVE, head-mounted display (HMD), tablet, mouse, augmented reality (AR), leap motion (LM), and a combination of HMD with LM. Participants’ performance was quantified through behavioral and verbal responses, which were captured through video recordings and written notes.ResultsThe findings of this study revealed that the user experience using technology was dependent on the patient profile; the patients had a better user experience when they use technologies with direct interaction configuration as opposed to indirect interaction configuration in terms of assistance required (P=.01) and comprehension (P=.01); the participants did not trigger any emotional responses when using any of the technologies; the participants’ performance was task-dependent; the most cost-effective technology was the mouse, whereas the least cost-effective was AR; and all the technologies, except for one (HMD with LM), were not exposed to external hazards.ConclusionsMost participants were able to perform tasks using out-of-the-shelf technologies. However, there is no perfect technology, as they are not explicitly designed to address the needs and skills of people with dementia. Here, we propose a set of guidelines that aim to help health professionals and engineers maximize user experience when using such technologies for the population with dementia.

Functional performance in a virtual reality task with differential executive functional loads

We presented a Virtual Reality (VR)-based functional task with three executive functional load levels and examined some aspects of this task using performance data of young healthy adults. We named the task the modified version of kitchen test (MVKT) from the Virtual Reality Functional Capacity Assessment Tool (VRFCAT). A sample of 42 participants (age M ​= ​20.95, SD ​= ​2.66; 69.05% female; 85.71% right handedness) completed MVKT and took a questionnaire regarding user experience and strategy use. First, we have evidence for good user experience. Chunking, visual and verbal strategies were reported to be used by most participants. Second, working memory capacity cannot fully predict performance in young healthy adults. This lack of meaningful relationship between the two was consistent across all three levels. Finally, we investigated the impact of executive functional load on the task performance. Quantitative analysis showed that performance declined as the load increased. Process analysis demonstrated that executive functional load impacted the sequential patterns of process, supporting the notion that people completed the task by proceeding down different paths to performance. We hope that by presenting our work, we have highlighted the unique characteristics of VR-based functional assessment to researchers who are interested in these methods.

Sensory conflict alters visual perception of action capabilities during crossing of a closing gap in virtual reality.

The somatosensory, vestibular, and visual systems contribute to multisensory integration, which facilitates locomotion around obstacles in the environment. The joystick-controlled virtual reality (VR) locomotion interface does not preserve congruent sensory input like real-walking, yet is commonly used in human behaviour research. Our purpose was to determine if collision avoidance behaviours were affected during an aperture crossing task when somatosensory and vestibular input were incongruent, and only vision was accurate. Participants included 36 young adults who completed a closing gap aperture crossing task in VR using real-walking and joystick-controlled locomotion. Participants successfully completed the task using both interfaces. Switch point between passable and impassable apertures was larger for joystick-controlled locomotion compared with real-walking, but time-to-contact (TTC) was lower for real-walking than joystick-controlled locomotion. Increased joystick-controlled locomotion switch point may be attributed to incongruency between visual and non-visual information, causing underestimation of distance travelled towards the aperture. Performance on future VR applications incorporating dynamically changing gaps can be considered successful using joystick-controlled locomotion, while taking into account a potential behaviour difference. Differences in TTC may be explained by the requirement of gait termination in real-walking but not in joystick-controlled locomotion. Future VR studies would benefit from programming acceleration and deceleration into joystick-controlled locomotion interfaces.

Body illusion and affordances: the influence of body representation on a walking imagery task in virtual reality.

It is well known that our body works as a fundamental reference when we perform visuo-perceptual judgements in spatial surroundings, and that body illusions can modify our perception of size and distance of objects in space. To date, however, few studies have evaluated whether or not a body illusion could have a significant impact on the way individuals perceive to move within the environment. Here, we used a full-body illusion paradigm to verify the hypothesis that an altered representation of the legs of the individuals influences their time-to-walk estimation while imaging to reach objects in a virtual environment. To do so, we asked a group of young healthy volunteers to perform a task in which they were required to imagine walking towards a previously seen target location in a virtual environment, soon after receiving the body illusion; we required participants to use a response button to time their imagined walk from start to end. We found that participants imagined walking faster following the illusion elicited by the vision of longer legs presented from an anatomical perspective, as compared to when experiencing standard legs in the same position.This difference in imagined walking distance decreased when the object to reach was displayed farther, suggesting a fading effect. Furthermore, taking into consideration the baseline error in walking time estimation in VR, we noticed a specific influence of the long anatomical legs in reducing the perceived time needed to reach an object and a general increase in the percentage of error when the same legs are presented in a non-anatomical orientation. These findings provide evidence that body illusions could influence the way individuals perceive their locomotion in the spatial surrounding.