To understand how each sensory input contributes to the experience of self-motion, it is helpful to remove individual sensory inputs to see what happens. For example, how does removing vision, using a blindfold for example, affect our ability to judge the distance we have traveled, our movement speed, or our movement direction? It turns out that we can actually still perform pretty well when one sense is missing! But if we want to know how each sensory input contributes when all inputs are available, as is the case during most everyday interactions, it becomes difficult to manipulate each input independently. Modern virtual reality (VR) technologies have made this challenge easier (to the experience of self-motion).
Using VR, the authors studied the contributions of visual and vestibular information for judging heading direction, which means knowing which way you are going. Participants were seated on a moving platform that moved them forward to the left or forward to the right, at very precise angles. Participants also watched a projection screen that made it look like they were in space, flying through a cloud of stars. The task for participants was simply to judge whether they moved to the left or to the right.

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Go to source: https://kids.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/frym.2020.00009