Exploring the Suitability of Existing VR Locomotion Technique Applications for Older Adults - A Scoping Review

Virtual reality (VR) locomotion techniques are commonly known as the ability to navigate or move in virtual spaces. With the increasing VR applications for older adults (OAs), locomotion techniques become increasingly important for their experience, especially since many VR applications aim to support healthy aging. Yet, we do not know whether the commonly used locomotion techniques in VR are suitably designed for OAs. As a first step toward understanding this, we conducted a scoping review of VR literature in two databases (ACM Library and IEEE Xplore). We employed the PRISMA method to identify papers that includes empirical studies and head mounted display (HMD) VR applications intended for OAs. The search returned 399 papers, and 47 papers were selected after 2 rounds of screening. The analysis of these papers shows that motion-based and room scale-based locomotion techniques are most common in VR applications for OAs. However, we also found a lack of formal evaluation of how suitable the common VR locomotion techniques are for OAs – a gap that needs addressing in order to improve the accessibility of VR for older users.