Charge Float Jump
More actions
| Charge Float Jump | |
|---|---|
| Information | |
| Type | Seated, Standing, Room-scale |
| Required Devices | Controllers |
| Description | The longer you hold the jump button, the higher you will rise in the VR space. |
| Pros | Player controls jump height with a single button; Crytek's designers described it as instinctive |
| Cons | Crytek found it can feel different without a visual aid such as a cockpit or constraint screen |
| Creator | Crytek |
Charge Float Jump is a Locomotion Method for virtual reality (VR) in which the player charges a jump by holding a button: the longer the button is held, the higher the player rises in the virtual space. The gravity applied to the player can also be reduced so that, instead of falling at a natural speed, the player floats and glides back down.[1]
The technique was one of the prototypes in a series of VR locomotion experiments by Crytek, which the studio shared with developers through Oculus in 2017.[2] Crytek recommended pairing it with a visual aid, either a cockpit or a "Constraint Screen" that blurs the player's peripheral vision, to reduce sickness.[1]
Origin
Crytek's research and development team built a test environment for studying movement in VR and presented the results as a series of video playlists with accompanying blog posts by game designer Julius Carter. The first post appeared in May 2017. In it, Crytek said that many of the methods it had explored went into its two Oculus Rift games, The Climb and Robinson: The Journey, and that it planned to share more than 40 videos covering methods that worked and methods that did not.[3][4] The test level was designed to resemble a game level rather than a white-box playground and was deliberately filled with features known to cause discomfort, among them a carousel, an elevator that moves up and down at random, a room that imitates the motion of a boat at sea, and platforms to jump off.[3] Reporting on the launch of the series, Road to VR noted Crytek's observation that button jumping did not appear to be much of a problem for comfort, while WASD movement, joystick input and button sprinting could make some users uncomfortable.[5]
Charge Float Jump was described in the second post of the series, "Movement and combinations", which appeared on the Oculus developer blog in August 2017 and on the CRYENGINE website on 8 September 2017.[6][1] That post singled out three methods from the playlist that the team had found successful: Charge Float Jump, HMD Acceleration and World Rotation.[1][2]
How it works
The player holds the jump button to charge the jump, and the height reached in the VR space increases with how long the button is held. The gravity settings can then be tweaked so that, instead of descending at a natural speed, the player floats and glides.[1] Crytek noted that the movement can feel a bit different without a visual aid, but that jumping quickly and then transitioning to floating can feel smooth.[1]
The Locomotion Vault database, an academic catalog of VR locomotion techniques, lists Charge Float Jump with Crytek as its creator and 2017 as its year. It records the required hardware as a button, places the technique in its controller-based group, and marks it as one that moves the user beyond the ground plane.[7] In the accompanying paper, the "beyond ground" attribute records whether the user's motion is limited to the ground or can extend above it, a distinction the authors trace to earlier work on flying in the air.[8]
Suggested applications
Crytek suggested that the movement would suit a hang-gliding or wingsuit game. Its designers called it "really instinctive" and said they thought it had a lot of potential.[1][2] In the same post, Crytek proposed combining it with HMD Acceleration, a method in which the player moves by tilting the head in the direction of travel, in an infinite runner with obstacles and collection points.[1]
Problems
Crytek discussed this form of artificial locomotion mainly in terms of VR sickness. It observed that without a visual aid the movement can feel a bit different.[1] Crytek's first post in the series also listed acceleration as a known source of discomfort in VR.[3]
Solutions
Crytek found that both a cockpit and a Constraint Scheme visual aid work well in reducing sickness for this method.[1] In the same post, it described these as the two aids it most often combined with movement methods: the "Constraint Screen", which blurs peripheral vision, and a cockpit, which it noted had already been widely adopted in VR games, including racing titles. According to Crytek, both can help developers use movements that might otherwise seem to "break the rules".[1]
Both approaches have been studied in academic research. Fernandes and Feiner at Columbia University presented dynamic field-of-view restrictors at the IEEE Symposium on 3D User Interfaces in 2016. These are soft-edged cutouts that narrow each eye's view during virtual motion. In their study, participants felt more comfortable and stayed in the virtual environment longer, and most of those who used the more subtle restrictors did not notice them.[9] (See Dynamic FOV Reduction.) Cockpits are an example of a rest frame, a visual element that stays stable relative to the physical environment. Cao, Grandi and Kopper note that earlier work by Cao and colleagues found rest frames effective at reducing visually induced motion sickness. They also note a drawback of field-of-view restrictors: the user may lose some peripheral awareness.[10][11]
Related techniques
Charge Float Jump is triggered by a button, not by the player's body. Physical jumping has been studied separately. JumpVR, presented at CHI 2020 by Dennis Wolf, Katja Rogers, Christoph Kunder and Enrico Rukzio, virtually scales the user's real jumps. In its user study (N=28), jumping in VR increased presence, motivation and immersion compared with teleportation and largely did not increase simulator sickness.[12] Locomotion Vault lists JumpVR as a separate entry that uses head tracking and a standing posture, with forward movement proportional to the height of the jump.[7]
References
- ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 Julius Carter (2017-09-08). "Developer Perspectives: VR Locomotion - Movement and combinations". CRYENGINE. Crytek. https://www.cryengine.com/news/view/developer-perspectives-vr-locomotion-movement-and-combinations. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Ben Lang (2017-08-25). "Oculus and Crytek Explore New & Novel Methods of VR Locomotion". Road to VR. https://www.roadtovr.com/oculus-crytek-explore-new-novel-methods-vr-locomotion/. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Julius Carter (2017-05-12). "VR locomotion - A series of experiments from Crytek". CRYENGINE. Crytek. https://www.cryengine.com/news/view/vr-locomotion-a-series-of-experiments-from-crytek. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
- ↑ Julius Carter (2017-05-11). "Developer Perspectives: VR Locomotion - A Series of Experiments From Crytek". Meta Horizon Developers Blog. Meta. https://developers.meta.com/horizon/blog/developer-perspectives-vr-locomotion-a-series-of-experiments-from-crytek/. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
- ↑ Dominic Brennan (2017-05-23). "Oculus Teams With Crytek to Share VR Locomotion Experiments". Road to VR. https://www.roadtovr.com/oculus-teams-crytek-share-vr-locomotion-experiments/. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
- ↑ Julius Carter (2017-08-23). "Developer Perspectives: VR Locomotion - Movement and Combinations". Meta Horizon Developers Blog. Meta. https://developers.meta.com/horizon/blog/developer-perspectives-vr-locomotionmovement-and-combinations/. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 "Locomotion Vault dataset". Locomotion Vault. https://locomotionvault.github.io/data/locomotionvault-dataset.json. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
- ↑ Massimiliano Di Luca, Hasti Seifi, Simon Egan, Mar Gonzalez-Franco (2021). "Locomotion Vault: the Extra Mile in Analyzing VR Locomotion Techniques". Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '21). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445319. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
- ↑ "Fighting virtual reality sickness". Phys.org. Columbia University School of Engineering and Applied Science. 2016-06-14. https://phys.org/news/2016-06-virtual-reality-sickness.html. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
- ↑ Zekun Cao, Jeronimo Grandi, Regis Kopper (2021). "Granulated Rest Frames Outperform Field of View Restrictors on Visual Search Performance". Frontiers in Virtual Reality, vol. 2. https://doi.org/10.3389/frvir.2021.604889. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
- ↑ Zekun Cao, Jason Jerald, Regis Kopper (2018). "Visually-Induced Motion Sickness Reduction via Static and Dynamic Rest Frames". 2018 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (VR), pp. 105-112. https://doi.org/10.1109/VR.2018.8446210. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
- ↑ Dennis Wolf, Katja Rogers, Christoph Kunder, Enrico Rukzio (2020). "JumpVR: Jump-Based Locomotion Augmentation for Virtual Reality". Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376243. Retrieved 2026-09-27.