REVIEW article
Front. Virtual Real.
Sec. Virtual Reality and Human Behaviour
Assessing and Enhancing the Ecological Validity of Human Locomotion in Virtual Reality
Provisionally accepted
- 1Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Department for the Psychology of Human Movement and Sport, Jena, Germany
- 2Center for Information and Neural Networks (CiNet), National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), Osaka, Japan
- 3Department of Health Promotion Science, Tokyo Metropolitan University, Tokyo, Japan
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The increasing use of virtual reality (VR) technologies in behavioral research raises a critical question: to what extent do behaviors in VR mirror those in the real world? VR offers strong experimental control and reproducibility, yet its ecological validity remains debated. This review examines two fundamental human locomotion behaviors, overground walking and collision avoidance in immersive VR, and evaluates how accurately these behaviors are reproduced. Practical strategies for enhancing ecological validity that do not require specialized hardware development are also proposed. Evidence indicates that fundamental behavioral patterns are largely preserved, supporting the use of VR as a valuable tool for investigating human locomotion. However, participants consistently adopt more conservative behavioral strategies in VR, such as slower walking speeds, increased interpersonal distances, and earlier avoidance initiation, largely due to egocentric distance underestimation and head-mounted display constraints such as restricted field of view, limited resolution, and latency. To address these limitations, we suggest design approaches supported by prior evidence, including enhanced ground textures, full-body avatars, and optimal calibration procedures, all of which can enhance behavioral realism in VR. This review provides a comprehensive account of the ecological validity of VR locomotion and offers actionable strategies to enhance behavioral realism, offering valuable guidance for future studies using VR.
Keywords: virtual reality, VR, Ecological Validity, human locomotion, Overground walking, collision avoidance, egocentric distance underestimation, head-mounted display
Received: 04 Sep 2025; Accepted: 08 Dec 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Sato, Suda and Higuchi. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Takahiro Higuchi
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