Evaluating online control of goal-directed arm movement while standing in virtual visual environment

The control of visually guided movement has been showed to be optimised when motor programming quickly integrated the visual information to update on-going motor commands. The purpose of this study was to verify this proposition for movement executed in virtual visual environment (VE), by exploring the effect of immersion on the on-line visuomotor control of goal-directed arm movement. Six subjects participated in the experiment, in which hand reaching toward a stationary or a moving virtual visual target (double step paradigm) was executed in standing posture. The analysis of the hand kinematics and postural adjustment showed an accurate control of movement and balance in both reaching conditions. This indicates that the immersion do not affects the on-line control processes used by the CNS to adjust movement in interactive VE.