The perception of both biological motion and faces is widely reported to be orientation-dependent (i.e., is impaired when the stimulus is inverted). For the perception of biological motion, there are at least two distinct inversion effects: one that is based upon the retrieval of form from motion and another that is based on the local motion of the limbs. The orientation of a visual stimulus can however be described with respect to a variety of allocentric (e.g., gravity, visual-environment) and egocentric (e.g., head-based) frames of reference. In the standard experimental setting, such reference frames are all aligned. Here, we investigated the role of different reference frames for the perception of faces and biological motion by testing observers (n = 12) on face recognition and biological motion tasks inside the York University "tumbling room". Independent rotations of the room, observer, and stimulus enabled comparisons of retinal, visual-environmental, and gravitational frames of reference. The biological motion task required observers to discriminate the facing direction (left or right) of a treadmill point-light walker shown in sagittal view. The face recognition task required observers to determine whether two consecutively presented faces were of the same or different identities. Performances on both the biological motion and face recognition tasks were best when the stimulus was aligned with the observer, as compared to gravity or the room. Interestingly, performances were also better when the stimulus was aligned with gravity as compared to the room, but for the biological motion task only. The results suggest that the perception of both biological motion and faces operates in large part in accordance with an egocentric frame of reference.