Collision avoidance in flying insects is mostly based on visual motion cues such as retinal image expansion or the relative magnitude of retinal image shifts. In earlier studies, we found that the activity of an identified visual interneuron (H1-cell) in a fly mounted on a bio-hybrid fly robot interface (FRI) was modulated by the robot’s turning radius and the distance to the walls of an experimental arena. To characterise the neural mechanisms underlying visual distance estimation we set up a virtual reality environment (FlyVR) that enabled us to reproduce the input to the motion vision pathway experienced by flies on the FRI and record the H1-cell activity without modulations by other sensory modalities. After establishing a qualitative alignment of the results obtained on the FRI and our FlyVR system, we now address the outstanding question of whether the distance-dependent modulation of the H1-cell activity depends on the velocity of the FRI. Our results suggest that at a fixed turning radius within the range tested the robot velocity hardly affects the H1-cell spike rate. The functional significance of this surprising result is discussed as well as further analysis steps to elucidate the neural computations involved.