Examination of age-related effects on the performance of a virtual environment locomotion task

A locomotion task has been developed to determine the performance of the elderly in virtual environments (VE). The locomotion task was adopted from the Virtual Environment Performance Assessment Battery (VEPAB), which is a battery of psychomotor and visual tasks, usable for comparing various VE interfaces or populations. Older and younger participants were asked to navigate through a series of ten consecutive three dimensional rooms as quickly as possible while attempting to minimize collisions. While no differences were found between ages for the number of collisions made, younger individuals moved through the rooms faster than the older ones. The younger males recorded faster traversal times than the younger females