VR for the elderly: quantitative and qualitative differences in performance with a driving simulator.

This article presents an analysis of age differences in virtual reality (VR) use. One hundred forty-eight users, grouped by age and balanced by gender, answered questionnaires about their driving, educational, and medical histories, as well as their experience with computers. Participants then completed a driving assessment in a low-cost, PC-based virtual environment known as DriVR. Dependent measures included both automatic and observer recorded quantitative measures of driving performance, as well as participant reported qualitative measures of difficulty, comfort, visual clarity, delay, and simulator sickness. There were few age-related differences in quantitative measures, whereas qualitative differences between middle-aged and elderly participants were seldom found. These results indicated that use of VR with the elderly is quite feasible. In a contradiction of previously reported results, symptoms of simulator sickness increased with age.