Climbing

Climbing
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Information
Type	Seated, Standing, Room-scale
Required Devices	Motion-tracked controllers
Description	Players climb up walls, mounts and other objects by swinging their hands and pulling triggers to grab.
Pros	Movement is driven by the user's own arm motion; rated low for nausea in the Locomotion Vault database; high physical engagement
Cons	Mostly limited to climbable surfaces; slow; tiring for the arms; low motor accessibility; shaking a gripping hand also moves the viewpoint
Examples	Climbey, The Climb, The Climb 2, Horizon Call of the Mountain

Climbing is a Locomotion Method. In virtual reality (VR) the user reaches for a handhold with a tracked motion controller, holds a button or trigger to grab it, and pulls the arm toward the body; the application moves the viewpoint by the opposite of the hand's motion, so pulling down lifts the player up. Releasing the hands makes the player fall.

Climbing belongs to the "grab" family of techniques, alongside grab-and-pull movement, zero-gravity pushing and hand walking. A 2024 review of 330 widely used commercial VR applications found climbing in 46 of them (13.9%), and reported that arm-tracked grabbing techniques such as climbing went from 3% of applications released in 2016 to more than 30% in each year from 2020 to 2023. Games built around climbing include Crytek's The Climb and The Climb 2, Brian Lindenhof's Climbey, and Horizon Call of the Mountain from Guerrilla and Firesprite.

Reviewed 27 September 2026. Checked all new text against the cited Anderton et al. 2024 review, Locomotion Vault dataset and paper, Cloudhead Games retrospective, Crytek and PlayStation announcements, Road to VR and UploadVR articles, Meta design guidelines, Steam store page and both Kosmalla et al. papers; confirmed no prior accurate content was dropped. About review dates.

How it works

When the user grabs a hold, the application stores the hand's position on that surface. Any later hand motion is applied to the player's body in reverse: lowering the arm raises the camera and body, and raising the arm lowers them. Paul White of Cloudhead Games used this approach in a climbing prototype he built in late 2013. Road to VR's Frank He summarized the effect after trying The Climb with Oculus Touch controllers: "the way locomotion works is that you move the world around you when you're gripping."

The Locomotion Vault, a database of VR locomotion techniques published at CHI 2021 by Massimiliano Di Luca, Hasti Seifi, Simon Egan and Mar Gonzalez-Franco, lists climbing under its "grab" group. Its entry gives controller tracking as the required hardware, allows any posture, and rates the technique high for energy and embodiment, low for speed and accessibility, and low for nausea. It also marks climbing as a technique for movement "beyond ground". Meta's developer design guidelines list climbing as an example of "embodied physics locomotion", together with diving, arm swinging and "grabbing objects to propel yourself forward"; they define the category as navigating "by using the avatar's hands, arms or virtual gear to locomote through the environment".

Some commercial games add systems on top of the basic grip. In The Climb 2, UploadVR's review describes stamina rings on each wrist, chalk that is re-applied by pressing the grip button and shaking the hand, a partial trigger press that holds on without reducing maximum stamina, and jumps or throws that cover large gaps. In the Quest version of the first game, climbing and jumping raise the player's heart rate, which makes the hands sweat and requires more frequent chalking.

Push-button climbing and climbing-in-place

Felix Kosmalla and colleagues at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) proposed a "Climbing Reality Continuum" that places climbing activities between purely virtual climbing and real rock climbing. Climbing with a gamepad, as in the original release of The Climb, they called "push-button-climb", after the push-button-fly technique from earlier locomotion research. Grabbing virtual grips with motion-tracked controllers and pulling the body up by moving the arms they called "climbing-in-place", by analogy with walking-in-place. On their continuum, climbing-in-place sits between push-button climbing and climbing on a real artificial wall.

Related grab techniques

The Locomotion Vault describes several techniques that share climbing's grab-and-move principle:

Technique	Description in Locomotion Vault
Climbing	Players climb walls and other objects by swinging their hands and pulling triggers to grab; releasing the hands makes the player fall
Grab and Pull	Holding a controller button "attaches" the world to the controller, so moving the controller moves the point of view until the button is released
Grab + No Gravity	The user grabs the environment and pushes off to move in 3D; inertia continues the movement until the next grab
Hand Walking	The controllers are used like feet on the floor, and the user can jump by pushing off the environment

The database lists Climbey and The Climb as climbing examples, Lone Echo as an example of zero-gravity grabbing, and Lucid Trips as an example of hand walking.

The 2024 commercial review counted grab and pull in 20 of its 330 applications (6.1%) and hand walking in 11 (3.3%). It singled out hand walking, citing Gorilla Tag, as a growing technique found in 11.8% of the reviewed applications released in 2022 and 13.6% of those released in 2023.

History

Climbing experiments predate consumer VR headsets with tracked controllers. In late 2013 Paul White of Cloudhead Games used the Razer Hydra, an early magnetically tracked motion controller, with the Oculus Rift DK1 to build a climbing section for Exploration School, a tech demo for the studio's game The Gallery. The goal was to climb a wall "without using control sticks", by reaching out and pressing a button to capture the hand's position on the surface. White wrote that motion sickness was a concern internally but that there were too few headsets in use to measure it; at public events the team told players, "Don't look down." He later built a spherical climbing ladder, inspired by geodesic domes, that turned the player upside down, although it was not used in the game. After Valve showed the studio its tracked room-scale hardware at the end of 2014, White found that the climbing code, which assumed a fixed player position, broke when players walked physically while holding on, because the arm would stretch away from the ladder.

Crytek released The Climb for the Oculus Rift on 28 April 2016 at US$49.99 on Oculus Home, with settings called Alps, Bay and Canyon. At launch it used an Xbox gamepad: the player's hand followed the head's gaze, and a trigger press grabbed a hold, which Road to VR's Scott Hayden said caused neck strain. On 6 December 2016 Crytek added Touch support and a new setting, North, in a free update, letting players climb with hand movements. Scott Hayden, trying the Touch version before release, wrote that reaching and grabbing was "so much more satisfying" than using a gamepad, though it left his arms tired.

Climbey, a VR-only game by Brian Lindenhof published by ShadowBrain Games, entered Early Access on Steam on 25 October 2016 and had its full release on 8 January 2022. The Climb came to the Oculus Quest on 3 December 2019. Its sequel, The Climb 2, launched on 4 March 2021 for Oculus Quest and Oculus Quest 2 at US$29.99, adding a city environment and moving ropes, ladders and hanging containers. Horizon Call of the Mountain, developed by Guerrilla and Firesprite, launched with the PlayStation VR2 on 22 February 2023, with climbing at the center of its design.

Use in games

Game	Developer	First release	Platform at release	Climbing input
The Climb	Crytek	28 April 2016	Oculus Rift	Gamepad at launch; Oculus Touch from 6 December 2016
Climbey	Brian Lindenhof	25 October 2016 (Early Access)	PC VR (Steam)	Tracked motion controllers
The Climb 2	Crytek	4 March 2021	Oculus Quest, Oculus Quest 2	Touch controllers with stamina and chalk
Horizon Call of the Mountain	Guerrilla and Firesprite	22 February 2023	PlayStation VR2	Hands, then climbing tools found later in the game

In Climbey, players race to a finish line across physics-based climbing and jumping courses. The game has 15 intro levels, a level editor with Steam Workshop support, online multiplayer for up to 10 players, and comfort options that include floor markers, field-of-view reduction and a protective cage. In his review of Horizon Call of the Mountain, Ben Lang estimated that climbing made up about 50-60% of the gameplay. Players start by climbing with their hands and later find tools that change how climbing works. Lang also wrote that he did not think he fell to his death a single time.

Problems

Climbing asks for sustained arm movement. Scott Hayden's hands-on with the Touch version of The Climb and UploadVR's review of The Climb 2 both reported tired arms; in the latter, the reviewer's arms were sore after two or three climbs of 10-15 minutes each. Meta's comfort guidance lists fatigue as a risk of physical locomotion, world pulling and arm swinging, and suggests artificial locomotion and support for seated use as mitigations.

Grip-driven movement is often comfortable, but it does not remove VR sickness for everyone. Previewing the Touch version of The Climb, Frank He wrote that moving the world by gripping did not give him "the stomach twist", but that dropping or launching himself gave a distinct feeling of motion. Ben Lang noted that in any VR climbing game a player holding a handhold can shake their own body around by moving the arm, and that "very sensitive" players are likely to find this uncomfortable regardless of blinders. In the gamepad version of The Climb, reaching around a corner or jumping to an opposite wall made the world shift around the player, and the game carried an "Intense" comfort rating. Aiming the hand with the head also forced players to crane their necks; Hayden found that standing instead of sitting reduced the pain.

Room-scale tracking adds another problem: the player can walk or lean while holding on. Cloudhead Games found that this broke climbing code built around a fixed player position, and Meta's guidelines tell developers using hand-over-hand grab climbing to "plan how the avatar will respond if the user moves physically while climbing". The same guidelines name getting on and off a climbing surface, turning while climbing, and climbing down as design problems specific to climbing.

Accessibility is a further limit. The Locomotion Vault rates climbing low for accessibility. The authors of the 2024 commercial review wrote that the precise arm movements required by grab techniques such as climbing make further accessibility research urgent, so that locomotion is usable, flexible and adaptable to varied needs.

Solutions

To avoid these problems, Meta's guidelines suggest teleporting the player to a safe spot near the top or bottom of the climbing surface. Horizon Call of the Mountain has an "Arm Reach Multiplier" setting for players who do not want to reach as far or physically cannot, along with blinders, snap and smooth turning, and seated and standing modes. Climbey offers motion-sickness settings, floor markers, field-of-view reduction and a protective cage.

Games also give players ways to rest their grip. In the gamepad version of The Climb, a player could hang one-handed indefinitely by holding the trigger halfway. In The Climb 2, a partial trigger press holds on without reducing maximum stamina. Touch support in The Climb let players reach for holds with their hands instead of aiming with the head and a gamepad.

Research

Researchers have also studied VR climbing on physical walls, which adds the touch feedback and exertion of real climbing. Kosmalla and colleagues built a prototype in which a user wearing an HTC Vive fitted with a Leap Motion hand tracker climbed a real 3 by 4 metre artificial climbing wall that was registered to a virtual rock, using the physical wall as a passive haptic proxy. They wrote that The Climb "comes closest to climbing in VR" but lacks "exertion and haptic feedback". A follow-up pilot study with 18 participants, who climbed with Vive trackers on their hands and feet, found that showing a virtual representation of the feet was more important than showing the hands, judged by perceived hand and foot accuracy and enjoyment. Participants without a foot visualization perceived significantly more stepping errors, and 55% preferred seeing both hands and feet.

See also

• Locomotion
• Teleportation
• Walking-in-place
• Artificial locomotion
• VR sickness