Handwalking

Handwalking
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Information
Type	Standing, Sitting
Required Devices	Tracked motion controllers (HTC Vive or Oculus Rift)
Description	…a Virtual Reality experience which takes places in planetary dream worlds. You explore artistically designed planets with a completely new concept, defining and navigating your avatar in a distinctive way, using hand motion controllers.
Pros	Reduced till no VR sickness. Easy to handle. Intuitive. Feels rewarding. Gliding possible.
Cons	Can only be applied to special movement concepts.
Creator	Nico Uthe
Examples	Lucid Trips

Handwalking (also written "hand walking") is a Locomotion Method for virtual reality in which the user moves an avatar by pushing and pulling against the virtual ground with tracked hand motion controllers, instead of walking with the feet, pressing a thumbstick or teleporting. The term comes from Lucid Trips, a VR game by a small German team, whose official website described its movement system as a "handwalking character controller" through which "all locomotion and interaction like walking, jumping, climbing, swimming and flying is possible". Co-developer Nico Uthe said the idea came from his own lucid dreams, including dreams in which he walked with his hands.

Because the player stays in one place, sitting or standing, handwalking allows continuous travel through a large virtual world without a Room-scale play area; the game's store description advertises "No teleport nor room scale". Road to VR later named Lucid Trips among the early VR games that contributed to arm-based movement, a style of locomotion that Echo VR and Gorilla Tag brought to a much larger audience.

Reviewed 27 September 2026. Checked every sourced claim and quotation against the UploadVR (2015, 2016), Road to VR (2016, 2024), Motherboard (2014), Game Developer (2017), Steam store and archived official-site citations, and the infobox Type and Required Devices changes. About review dates.

How it works

The avatar used for handwalking has no legs. In a 2014 interview, Uthe described it this way: "Imagine your body consisting only of hands, arms, chest and head, and your body hovers approximately one foot above the ground." He compared the concept to "the movement of astronauts in outer space where there is no gravitation". The positions of the player's real arms are carried over to the virtual arms with inverse kinematics (IK), using the hand motion controllers. In a 2017 design article, co-developer Sara Vogl wrote that the body hovers over the ground and the player "alternately" uses the hands to move forward, and suggested thinking of the body "as sitting on a hover board like in the movie Back to the Future".

In UploadVR's description of an early build, the avatar is constantly sinking towards the ground. The player launches upward and outward by swinging the hands toward the approaching floor. The angle of the palms sets the direction of the launch, while the timing of the push and the force of the swing decide how high and how far the avatar travels. Once airborne, pressing the controller triggers fires a thrust from the virtual hands. This thrust draws on a limited energy supply, which recharges when the hands rest on the ground for a few seconds. Writing for Road to VR, Ben Lang described launching high into the air with "two arms and an exaggerated shove off the ground", spreading the arms to glide, and a boost ability for brief powered flight; after some practice he was moving along the landscape with smooth strokes, "almost as if swimming". The same hand input also covers climbing: the Early Access release of Lucid Trips lists "physically based climbing" among its features.

Additional information

A natural hand walking method that user might know from real dreams

If you gently pull the Avatar's hands across the floor, you will move. If you push yourself off the ground, you can jump and make a long glide.

History

Origin

Uthe traced the name of the game and its movement to lucid dreaming: "I used to have lucid dreams, I was flying or in a low gravity situation. I also had dreams where i walked with my hands and that's what inspired this sort of interesting game." He also explained why the arms were used at all: "You need your feet to stand on the ground so your arms are free. That makes it obvious to make something using the arms". Vogl's 2017 article argued that room-scale tracking is limited by the size of the real room, and called the teleportation mechanic and omnidirectional treadmills "more clunky approaches".

Development

Lucid Trips was made by a four-person team from the VR Nerds collective. Uthe and Vogl both had a background in communication design and, according to Vogl, "got into VR and Unity due to the Rift DK1". The official website listed the team as Nico Uthe, Sara Vogl, Sebastian Hinz and Julian Heinken, located in Hamburg and Berlin. In July 2015 UploadVR reported that the team had spent two years developing its locomotion solution, that the project was self-funded, and that a Kickstarter campaign was planned.

The controller went through several generations of hardware, according to Vogl:

Period	Headset	Hand controllers
Early development	Oculus Rift DK1	Razer Hydra (wired)
From summer 2014	Oculus Rift DK2	PlayStation Move (wireless)
From summer 2015	HTC Vive development kits	HTC Vive controllers

The team also built physical installations around the technique. In December 2014 Motherboard reported, citing the game's website, that Lucid Trips would come with "a complete hanger assembly and an Air-feedback device to simulate drag and thrust". Vogl later described a hammock-like rig that held the player "standing or kneeling in a 30 degree forward angle", and said the team had also worked on a "quadrocopter based wind feedback" linked to the avatar's speed and direction. UploadVR reported in 2015 that this suspended version would likely remain limited to installations at events. For everyday use, the official website said, the player sits on a stool without armrests so that the hands are free.

Release

In May 2016 the team was developing on the HTC Vive and hoped to release on Oculus Touch and PlayStation VR once those platforms were available. Lucid Trips was released in Early Access on Steam on 12 January 2017. Its store page describes it as a "sitting experience" with tracked controller support and lists the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift as the supported headsets. Vogl wrote in March 2017 that "after 3 years of prototyping and iteration" the player could switch between walking, jumping, flying and climbing. The developers planned to keep the game in Early Access "until Q4 2017 or at the longest 9 months"; as of September 2026 the Steam store page still lists it as an Early Access game.

Problems

Handwalking can cause discomfort for some players. The first versions of the Lucid Trips avatar had realistic gravity, and the player could "just start to walk and run forward, jump off the ground, spread their arms and fly". Vogl wrote that while the developers felt fine with this, "some playtesters weren't at all". The Steam release warns that the game is based on "an experimental locomotion concept which can cause discomfort for some people" and gives a "max recommended playtime for beginners" of 15 minutes. The technique also takes practice; UploadVR's reviewer wrote that it only became natural "once you get the hang of it".

Solutions

The developers added comfort measures after opening playtests to a growing number of VR enthusiasts and newcomers. Vogl gave the following reasons and measures:

• Because movement is triggered by moving the whole wrist and not only the fingers, "the brain seems to be less confused by the triggered moves".
• The environment was given "a very low gravity that makes large and frequent up and down movements not possible until wanted".
• To stabilise the player's gaze, the game adds localised particles in the player's view and a vignette that reacts to unwanted movement, especially backwards or sideways.

Both visual aids are set with a comfort level from one to seven on the controller touchpad. According to the Steam description, level 7 "is maximum comfort with max particles in your view and vignette reaction".

Reception

In his hands-on for Road to VR, Ben Lang called the system "a complete departure from anything else I've seen in VR" and wrote that he found it "a completely comfortable way of getting around a virtual world". Joe Durbin of UploadVR wrote that once learned, it "becomes one of the most liberating motion mechanics of any game around" because motion in the game "feels 100% natural and self-controlled".

Related techniques

Handwalking belongs to a wider group of locomotion methods driven by arm movement rather than a thumbstick. In a 2024 article, Road to VR named Lucid Trips, Climbey and Sprint Vector among early games that contributed to arm-based movement, and credited Echo VR and its single-player counterpart Lone Echo with popularizing it through zero-gravity movement in which players push and pull themselves around with their hands. Gorilla Tag (2021), whose creator cited Echo VR as an inspiration, uses its own form of arm-based locomotion and became one of the most popular VR games.

See also

• Locomotion
• Artificial locomotion
• Teleportation
• Walking-in-place
• Lucid Trips