• The Journal of The Korea Institute of Intelligent Transport Systems
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• v.21 no.5
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• pp.15-27
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• 2022

An omnidirectional VR treadmill is a highly-immersive walking simulator that allows identical body movements, such as walking, running, and sitting. However, the operation difficulty of an omnidirectional VR treadmill may cause data reliability problems. Therefore, this study aims to verify the effectiveness of a VR treadmill by comparing the ability to orient in the real and virtual worlds spatially. For this purpose, a rotating and searching path experiment was conducted with participants. This experiment showed that there was no statistically significant difference in the ability of the participants to orient in the real and virtual worlds spatially. In addition, the omnidirectional VR treadmill requires an adaptation time for the users due to the difficulty in the treadmill operation. However, there was no significant difference in the difficulty felt by the participants according to the adaptation time. Hence, these findings supported the possibility of collecting realistic walking data without safety concerns through an omnidirectional VR treadmill. Furthermore, this treadmill could be used in future research to solve problems directly related to pedestrian safety, such as the interaction between vehicles and pedestrians.