Bobbing-Walking

Bobbing-Walking
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Information
Type	Standing, Room-scale
Required Devices	HMD
Description	Bob or shake the HMD to move, you'll need to run or bounce in place to activate the mechanism,
Pros	Hands-free; needs no hardware beyond the headset
Cons	The user bounces in place without seeing the real room, so the creator warns of a risk of falling and recommends a cleared, taped-off play space
Creator	cubic9
Examples	FROG JUMPER, BobbingBots, Mikujalus

Bobbing-Walking is a Locomotion Method for virtual reality in which the user moves forward through a virtual environment by bouncing up and down on the spot, as if jogging in place, while wearing a head-mounted display. The headset's own motion sensors detect the bounce, so no controller, treadmill or other extra device is needed. Looking upward while bouncing moves the user backward instead.

The technique was created by the Japanese hobbyist developer cubic9com (Kyūkon) as a free script for the Unity game engine and the Oculus Rift. It was first released in December 2014 alongside BobbingBots, a first-person shooter demo built from Unity's AngryBots sample game. It is a form of walking-in-place locomotion that relies only on the headset's built-in sensors.

Reviewed 27 September 2026. Checked the creator's project pages, sample readme and BobbingWalkingOVRPlayerController.cs source, the Niconico and YouTube video metadata, the Inside Games report, n_ryota's blog post, the Slater et al. 1995 and VR-STEP paper records, and the Road to VR and KitGuru CAOTS articles. About review dates.

History

When cubic9com developed the script, most Oculus Rift games were played with a gamepad. The creator wanted a more natural interface that did not depend on special devices. The Japanese version of the project page adds that walking devices such as the Virtuix Omni and Cyberith Virtualizer were large and heavy, which made them hard to use in Japanese homes, and that it was unrealistic to ask people who downloaded a free app from the web to buy separate equipment for it.

On 15 December 2014 cubic9com posted a video to Niconico titled "Oculus RiftとAndroidで仮想空間を歩きまわって撃ったりさわったりしてみた" ("Walking and shooting in virtual space with Oculus Rift and Android"). Its description notes that an earlier version of the creator's Android-controlled demo had used a gamepad for player movement, and that this version moved the player with the Oculus Rift itself. The creator's project history lists the release of the BobbingBots game on 17 December 2014 and an English YouTube video, "I modified AngryBots into FPS-style game with Oculus Rift and Android phone", on 20 December 2014, with Bobbing-Walking and the DroidGlove phone app given as its technical components. The sample project's readme dates the first standalone release of the script to 20 December 2014, when it was split out of the DroidGlove Unity sample.

The Japanese game news site Inside Games covered the video on 20 December 2014. It described the demo as an attempt at more intuitive control of the Oculus Rift than the usual gamepad, focusing on the DroidGlove hand input and on a scene in which the player touches Hatsune Miku. The name "Bobbing-Walking" was suggested by izm, whom cubic9com thanks on the project page.

How it works

The user stands in place wearing the headset and bounces up and down as though jogging. The headset detects the motion and moves the player forward in the direction they are facing. To move backward, the user tilts the front of the headset upward (looks toward the sky) and bounces in the same way.

The main script in the published sample project is BobbingWalkingOVRPlayerController.cs, which extends the player controller from the Oculus SDK Unity integration. In the 2016 version of the script, each frame reads the headset's acceleration from the Oculus SDK and transforms it with the player object's transform matrix. A downward acceleration below a fixed threshold marks the start of a bounce; if an upward acceleration above a matching threshold follows within two seconds, the script counts a step and pushes the player forward. The size of the push grows with how far the upward acceleration exceeds the threshold, up to a cap, so harder bounces give larger steps. Movement is applied only while the player character is on the ground. The script chooses backward movement when the camera's pitch angle is between 270 and 325 degrees in Unity's rotation convention, which corresponds to looking upward by roughly 35 degrees or more.

An earlier version detected the upward look with an invisible "roof" object placed in the scene. The 23 December 2014 update removed the roof object and switched to reading the camera angle.

Version history

The readme bundled with the sample project lists these releases:

Version	Change
2014-12-20	First release, split out of the DroidGlove Unity sample
2014-12-23	Upward-look detection changed from a roof object to the camera angle
2015-04-12	Updated for Unity 5.0.1f1 and Oculus Runtime 0.5.0.1-beta
2016-03-30	Updated for Unity 5.3.4p1 and Oculus SDK 1.3.0

Uses

The creator lists three applications that use Bobbing-Walking: Mikujalus, BobbingBots and FROG JUMPER.

In BobbingBots, a modified version of Unity's AngryBots sample converted from a third-person shooter into a first-person shooter, the player aims a gun by rotating an Android phone running cubic9com's DroidGlove app and fires by swiping down on the phone's screen. Movement uses Bobbing-Walking: bouncing while looking ahead moves the player forward, and bouncing while looking at the sky moves the player backward. Keyboard arrow keys and a gamepad analog stick are also supported. The creator describes BobbingBots as having been made to film a video introducing DroidGlove and Bobbing-Walking.

Mikujalus is cubic9com's Oculus Rift application in which the user touches Hatsune Miku's hair with a modified Power Glove or with DroidGlove. Its usage notes say that bouncing up and down lets the user walk around the virtual world.

The script was also bundled with the DroidGlove sample projects: one for PC and the Oculus Rift, and one for Android and Google Cardboard or similar phone viewers. As of September 2026, the downloads for BobbingBots and Mikujalus are listed as unavailable on the creator's site, while the Bobbing-Walking Unity sample project is still offered.

Problems

Because the user bounces in place while the headset blocks their view of the room, the main hazard the creator identifies is falling or bumping into objects. Detection uses only the headset's acceleration against fixed thresholds; nothing senses the user's legs or feet. Game developer n_ryota, who built a related stepping-in-place demo in 2016, wrote that recognizing walking and running from headset motion while reducing false detections required laborious tuning of angles and movement.

Solutions

The creator's safety instructions, repeated on the project pages and in the sample readme, ask users to:

• look around first and stay at least 7 feet (the Japanese page says 2 meters) away from furniture and other objects;
• mark a circle on the floor around themselves with tape and not step outside it;
• avoid moving fast.

The Japanese pages add that when someone else is trying the software, the person running the demo should keep watching them.

Related techniques

Detecting walking in place from head movement was studied in academic research long before Bobbing-Walking. In a 1995 paper, Mel Slater, Martin Usoh and Anthony Steed described a technique in which a neural network analyzed the stream of coordinates from the head-mounted display to decide whether the participant was walking on the spot, and moved the participant in the direction of their gaze when it was. Their studies suggested that the walking method raised subjective presence compared with hand-pointing navigation, provided participants identified with their virtual body.

For phone-based headsets, Sam Tregillus and Eelke Folmer presented VR-STEP at CHI 2016. It implements walking-in-place with real-time pedometry using only a smartphone's inertial sensors. In their study of 18 users, VR-STEP showed no significant difference in performance or reliability from a common auto-walk method, and users found it more immersive and intuitive.

In May 2016, n_ryota built a stepping-in-place demo for the Oculus Rift CV1 and wrote that cubic9com's Bobbing-Walking demo had shown him the approach was possible. His version kept vertical headset motion for running and added sideways headset motion to recognize walking.

The Freedom Locomotion System, shown by Huge Robot in January 2017, includes a run-in-place mode called CAOTS (Controller Assisted On the Spot). According to KitGuru, CAOTS uses tracking data from the bob of the headset and the movement of the controllers to simulate walking, running and sprinting, while the direction of travel comes from a press on the controller touchpad.

See also

• Walking-in-place
• Running-in-place
• Locomotion
• Freedom Locomotion System