Locomotion

A virtual reality locomotion demonstration

See also: Locomotion Methods, Teleportation and Redirected walking

Locomotion refers to the methods used to move a user through virtual worlds in virtual reality (VR) and, to a lesser extent, augmented reality (AR). Because a person wearing a head-mounted display occupies a fixed physical area while the virtual environment can extend far beyond it, locomotion techniques must reconcile the limits of the real space and the positional tracking system with the freedom of movement expected inside the virtual scene. The choice of technique affects immersion, ease of use, fatigue, and the likelihood of cybersickness.

Research on the problem predates consumer headsets. Laboratory studies of the 1990s compared walking in place, real walking and push-button "flying", and the omnidirectional treadmill and redirected walking were described in papers from 1997 and 2001. Since the 2016 consumer launches of the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive, commercial applications have paired physical movement within a tracked play area with artificial techniques such as teleportation, thumbstick-driven smooth movement, snap turning and arm-driven climbing. Meta's developer guidelines recommend comfort-oriented defaults and user-selectable movement and turning styles, and Apple's visionOS guidelines advise limiting visual motion that can cause discomfort.

Reviewed 17 October 2026. Cited papers, Meta, Apple and Unity developer pages, Virtuix and KAT VR store pages and press articles checked against the claims they support. About review dates.

Definition and scope

In their 1997 paper on the omni-directional treadmill, Rudolph Darken, William Cockayne and David Carmein described locomotion as the mechanism that lets users cover large distances in a virtual world without moving far in physical space, and separated it from maneuvering, the fine movements over short distances such as sidestepping or turning in place. In the same year Doug Bowman, David Koller and Larry Hodges used the term "travel" for first-person viewpoint motion control. Their taxonomy splits a travel technique into three design decisions: direction or target selection (how the user steers or picks a goal), velocity and acceleration selection, and input conditions (how the start, duration and end of a movement are specified). They proposed judging techniques by quality factors that include speed, accuracy, spatial awareness, ease of learning, ease of use, information gathering and presence.

Meta's developer documentation uses a simpler two-way split. In physical locomotion, movement in the virtual world is controlled by movement in the physical world, with the virtual camera following the headset one to one. In artificial locomotion, virtual movement does not exactly correspond to physical movement, for example when the user pushes a thumbstick. Meta states that the most common use of artificial locomotion is to let people move through virtual environments larger than their physical play space, and that an app built for physical locomotion can also offer artificial movement for people with limited space or mobility.

Locomotion methods

See also: Locomotion Methods

Method	Type	Required Devices	Description	Pros	Cons	Creator	Examples
ArmSwinger	Standing Room-scale VR	Motion-tracked controllers	Players move by swinging their arms as if they are running but do not move their legs.	More immersive than teleportation, works in most types of games and experiences	Cannot use weapons or perform actions with hands while moving.	Electric Night Owl, LLC
Astral body	Standing Seated Room-scale VR	Gamepad or VR controller with thumbstick	First person when you need to interact with the environment, Third person when you need to run around in the environment	Easy to navigate and interact, clean	Immersion breaking for some	???	Alice Mystery Garden
Blink	Standing Room-scale VR	Motion-tracked controllers	Builds upon Teleportation to create 3 more types of movement techniques called Cinematic Blink, Precision Blink and Volume Blink	Reduce simulator sickness, allows for the scaling of play space sizes	Negative impact on immersion, as acknowledged by its developer	Cloudhead Games	The Gallery - Episode 1: Call of the Starseed, The Gallery - Episode 2: Heart of the Emberstone
Bobbing-Walking	Standing Room-scale VR	HMD	Bob or shake the HMD to move, you'll need to run or bounce in place to activate the mechanism,	Hands-free; needs no hardware beyond the headset	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	cubic9	FROG JUMPER, BobbingBots, Mikujalus
Charge Float Jump	Standing Seated Room-scale VR	Controllers	The longer you hold the jump button, the higher you will rise in the VR space.	Player controls jump height with a single button; Crytek's designers described it as instinctive	Crytek found it can feel different without a visual aid such as a cockpit or constraint screen	Crytek
Climbing	Standing Seated Room-scale VR	Motion-tracked controllers	Players climb up walls, mounts and other objects by swinging their hands and pulling triggers to grab.	Movement is driven by the user's own arm motion; rated low for nausea in the Locomotion Vault database; high physical engagement	Mostly limited to climbable surfaces; slow; tiring for the arms; low motor accessibility; shaking a gripping hand also moves the viewpoint		Climbey, The Climb, The Climb 2, Horizon Call of the Mountain
Cloudstep	Standing Seated	Gamepad	Using the analog stick from a gamepad, players will move in that direction in discrete steps, similar to miniature teleportations. This method is designed to remove vection, which is suspected to cause simulator sickness during first person locomotion.	Reduces simulator sickness and improve player comfort	???	IrisVR, VR Bits	Technolust
Cockpit / Vehicle	Standing Seated Room-scale VR	None	A cockpit, vehicle interior or frame that stays fixed around the player gives a stable visual reference during virtual travel, which can reduce VR sickness; most players feel they are within a stable environment	reduces VR sickness; hides much of the moving scenery in the periphery while keeping the player inside the game world	only applicable in certain situations such as Driving, Spacecraft and Mech games; strong acceleration can still cause discomfort; enclosed cockpits restrict the peripheral view	N/A	Elite Dangerous, Gunjack, EVE: Valkyrie, Star Wars: Squadrons
Environmental Redirection	Room-scale VR	None	Design the game in a way to allow the player to move in circles in the play area. Players will never hit physical walls of the play area.	No artificial locomotion or teleport, no VR sickness	Requires meticulous game design, large play area requirement	Triangular Pixels	Unseen Diplomacy
Flight	Standing Seated Room-scale VR	None	Fly through the air with gaze as directional input, or with the direction set by hand pointing or body leaning.	Allows travel in three dimensions and beyond the physically tracked area; gaze-directed flying is easy for novice users to understand	Continuous visual motion without matching physical motion can cause VR sickness; lower sense of presence than walking; gaze-directed flying prevents looking around while moving	N/A	Eagle Flight, Marvel's Iron Man VR, Google Earth VR
Focal Point VR	Standing Seated Room-scale VR	Motion-tracked controllers (HTC Vive)	To move small distances, Grip and drag the environment. To move large distances, place 2 focal points on the ground with the controllers then rotate, scale, and translate the world.	No VR sickness (creator's claim); crosses large distances quickly by shrinking the world and scaling it back up	Pointing accuracy drops when aiming toward the horizon; rotations that tilt the horizon cause sickness; package is deprecated on the Unity Asset Store	Albert Hwang
Freedom Locomotion System	Standing Room-scale VR	Motion-tracked controllers	Collection of various standing and room-scale locomotion solutions with CAOTS as its foundation.	Hands stay free for interaction while moving; travel direction is independent of head direction; physical walking in place is intended to reduce motion sickness compared with sliding locomotion; teleport-style fallbacks for sensitive users	Walking in place is physically tiring; users drift forward in the real play area over time; setting direction with the thumb adds an artificial step that new users forget; a learning period of several minutes	HUGE ROBOT	Freedom Locomotion VR (demo)
HMD Position Acceleration	Standing Seated Room-scale VR	None	Initiating movement by looking in the direction you want to go. You tilt your head forward, you move forward. Tilt your head backwards, and you go backwards.	Movement is started and steered by tilting the head; Crytek described it as fun and intuitive, especially with a visual aid	Crytek reported that it "can be a bit nauseating"	Crytek
Hallway	Room-scale VR	None	Player walks down a long hallway that rotates slightly with each step, forcing the player to turn to the right and leading them to walk in circles around the play area.	Uses physical walking; designed to keep the player from reaching the edge of the play space	May cause simulator sickness	/u/qwv4851
Handwalking	Standing Seated	Tracked motion controllers (HTC Vive or Oculus Rift)	…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.	Reduced till no VR sickness. Easy to handle. Intuitive. Feels rewarding. Gliding possible.	Can only be applied to special movement concepts.	Nico Uthe	Lucid Trips
Holosphere	Standing Seated Room-scale VR	An input device; the 2015 demo used an Xbox 360 controller or a headset-mounted Leap Motion controller	whenever you move or rotate, a geodesic sphere appears around your entire view point and blurs everything else in the environment. The geodesic sphere disappears when you stop moving or rotating.	Designed to reduce nausea by giving the user a fixed visual frame of reference during artificial movement	Geodesic sphere appears when moving / rotating; the surrounding environment is blurred during movement	Tomáš "Frooxius" Mariančík	Neos: The Origin
Immersive Movement	Standing Room-scale VR Walking-in-place	Motion-tracked controllers (the original Unity package required SteamVR and the HTC Vive)	Hold a button on one of the controllers then run in place to move in VR.	Can use one of the hands to interact with environment while moving	Physically tiring over long sessions; less accessible than controller-based movement and limits what the hands can do while moving	Highsight
Lean-To-Move	Standing Room-scale VR	Motion-tracked controllers	Press a trigger on controller to record your origin, lean beyond the boundary threshold to move in game, return to origin to stop	Mitigates VR sickness, frees up the hands while moving, move for longer without being fatigued	Can drift from center of play area, difficult to turn	https://github.com/Erupac/LeanToMove
Ninja Run VR	Standing Seated Room-scale VR	Motion-tracked controllers in both hands	Stretch both arms in the opposite direction of your desired movement while leaning in the same direction of desired movement	Continuous movement without teleporting; the developer states that it reduces simulator sickness	Takes time to travel, can be tiring over long distances	Sean Hall	Shaolinja
Omnidirectional elevator	Room-scale VR	None	An elevator that can go in All directions	Fun, simple, not exhausting	Picky people will claim it makes them feel sick, Players are locked to their elevator.	???	???
PocketStrafe	Standing Room-scale VR Walking-in-place	Smartphone	Run PocketStrafe app on the smartphone, place the smartphone in your pocket, run in place to move.	Unlike other running-in-place locomotion methods, PocketStrafe frees up the hands and the controllers.	requires smartphone	Cool Font	Windlands, AltspaceVR, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter VR
Pull	Standing Seated Room-scale VR	Tracked controllers or hand tracking	Pulling the environment around you with your hands.	Fine-grained, precise positioning; travel speed and distance follow the user's own hand movement; rated low for nausea in the Locomotion Vault database	Physically tiring; slow for covering large virtual environments; rated high workload in a study of users with upper-body motor impairments		Google Earth VR, Lone Echo, Echo Arena
RIPmotion	Standing Room-scale VR Walking-in-place	Motion-tracked controllers	Put hands at your hips, press a button on each controller and run in place to move	Proprioceptive and vestibular engagement, VR sickness reduction, Immersive, Decouples head and body movement, fitness	Cannot interact with object with hands while moving,	Ryan Sullivan
Real world space	Room-scale VR	None	Users move in real world spaces.	Very realistic and immersive	Cannot function with large movements, Spaces are often limiting, spaces have to be designed for physical movement	???	Tea For God
Room-scale vehicle	Room-scale VR	Motion-tracked controllers	Entire play space becomes the inside of the vehicle, operate the controls in the vehicle to move the vehicle	Physical walking inside the vehicle combined with fast travel across large virtual environments; the vehicle's surroundings give the user a visual frame of reference	The vehicle's own movement is still artificial and can cause discomfort; the walkable interior is limited by the size of the physical play area	Hover Junkers	Hover Junkers, IronWolf VR
Shoot'n'Pull	Standing Room-scale VR	HTC Vive Motion Controller	Tower Tag offers an intuitive method of movement which gives the game a very dynamic gaming experience without the risk to cause motion sickness. Despite the relatively small space requirements.	No VR sickness. Easy to handle. Intuitive. Feels rewarding.	Fits only to one movement concept.	VR-Nerds GmbH	Tower Tag
Skier	Room-scale VR	Motion-tracked controllers	Moving the controllers backwards and below your waist causes the skier to propel himself forward.	???	???	/u/qwv4851
Snap N'Motion	Room-scale VR	None	When the player is about to hit a wall in real life, the character in VR instantly turns 180 degrees (face backwards). It forces the player to turn around in real life in order to move forward again.	Room-scale VR experience with limited physical space.	Constantly changing directions can be disorientating and unnatural.	RetroPlayGamerTV	???
Swimming	Standing Seated Room-scale VR	Motion-tracked controllers	Hold the triggers on the controllers then stroke or paddle to move.	Arm strokes give the user a physical action that matches the movement; in a seated study it reduced VR sickness about as much as teleportation while being rated more enjoyable than teleportation	Mostly used for water and underwater environments; tires the arms and shoulders; slower than joystick or teleport movement in some studies and rated harder to use		Ocean Rift, Freediver: Triton Down
Teleportation	Standing Seated Room-scale VR	None	Aim or point at a destination and press a button to relocate there instantly, usually with a short visual transition.	Intuitive and simple to learn; reduces vection and so reduces VR sickness for many users; needs no extra hardware	Can break immersion and presence; can impair spatial awareness, orientation, and distance estimation	N/A	The Lab, Budget Cuts, Vanishing Realms
Third-person	Standing Seated Room-scale VR	Gamepad	player's POV trails comfortably behind their character, works for third-person games with gamepads	very easy to implement, no need for motion-tracked controllers	Less immersive, can cause VR sickness		Lucky's Tale, Chronos, Moss, Astro Bot Rescue Mission
Tunneling	Standing Seated	Gamepad	The face-locked viewport ("tunnel") displays continuous motion and allows the user to steer the player like an FPS-style game. The peripheral view remains at the point of origin, so there is no controller-induced vection in the periphery.	Reduces VR sickness when moving with controller / gamepad	???	???	???
WalkAbout	Room-scale VR	Motion-tracked controllers	After reaching edge of playable space', virtual world is blurred and grid appears. Virtual world shifts to encompass open play area, forcing player to turn and face it. At this point the virtual world comes back into focus and grid disappears.	???	???	Tekton Games	The Dark Within
World Rotation	Standing Seated Room-scale VR	Motion-tracked Controllers	You pull a trigger, then move the controller left or right to rotate the world.	Controlled directly by a hand movement; Crytek reported that it can feel very natural and let players scan a scene while holding a weapon		Crytek	Crytek locomotion prototypes (2017); two-handed scene grabbing in Open Brush
World Rotator	Room-scale VR	None	Moving to the edge of the play area causes time to freeze and locks the world to the player's rotation. A HUD appears and shows the amount of open space in front of the player.	Works without controllers, using only headset tracking	Rated high for energy required and low for accessibility in the Locomotion Vault database	/u/qwv4851	Movement (2016 Unity demo)

History

Research systems

Before wide-area tracking was common, research on locomotion followed two lines: trackers large enough for users to really walk, and body-active substitutes for walking such as treadmills, bicycles, wheelchairs, roller skates and walking in place. Mel Slater, Martin Usoh and Anthony Steed described a walking-in-place technique in 1995 in which a neural network analysed the head-mounted display's position data to decide whether the participant was stepping on the spot, then moved the participant forward in the direction of gaze. In their studies, reported presence was higher with this method than with the usual hand-pointing navigation, provided that participants identified with their virtual body.

Bowman and colleagues' 1997 experiments found pointing-based steering more effective than gaze-directed steering for a relative motion task, and found that techniques which instantly teleport users to a new location were correlated with increased disorientation. The omni-directional treadmill described by Darken and Cockayne of the Naval Postgraduate School and David Carmein of Virtual Space Devices let a user walk or jog in any direction; it was the third in a series of such devices built for the U.S. Army's Dismounted Infantry Training Program. Their analysis concluded that its two main shortcomings were the tracking system and the machine control that kept the user centered on the treads.

In 1999 a team from University College London and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, including Slater and Fred Brooks, repeated the 1995 study and added real walking as a third condition, using a wide-area tracker that gave 5 by 4 metre training and experimental areas. Real walking was rated significantly easier (simpler, more straightforward and more natural) than both walking in place and flying, and the greatest difference in presence was between flyers and both groups of walkers. Two years later Sharif Razzaque, Zachariah Kohn and Mary Whitton introduced redirected walking. They noted that Michael Moshell and Dan Mapes at the University of Central Florida had tried a similar manipulation in 1994 but were stopped by simulator sickness and tracker limitations.

Consumer headsets

At launch in 2016, the consumer Oculus Rift's head tracking relied on a single sensor placed on the user's desk; Engadget wrote that it at most let a user stand up from a chair and look around, while the Vive's tracking allowed room-scale VR. Oculus brought three-sensor room-scale tracking out of beta as an officially supported configuration in May 2017, while two-sensor 360-degree tracking remained classified as experimental. By 2017 Boletsis described point-and-click teleportation as a mainstream VR locomotion technique, fully supported by commercial head-mounted displays. A 2016 study by Evren Bozgeyikli and colleagues presented "Point & Teleport", in which users point where they want to be and are moved there; in a comparison with walk-in-place and joystick locomotion, the authors found it a fun and user-friendly method.

Later commercial games moved toward offering several options at once. Valve's Half-Life: Alyx shipped with "Blink" teleport, "Shift" movement and "Continuous" locomotion; in a development video Valve explained how the team moved away from the teleport system of its 2016 collection The Lab. Gorilla Tag (2021) has no buttons, sticks or teleportation: players move by pushing off surfaces with their arms, a system UploadVR compared to the locomotion of Echo VR. A 2024 review by Craig Anderton and colleagues of 330 of the most used VR applications released from 2016 to 2023 on Steam, Meta, Oculus, Viveport and SideQuest found that the share of titles with at least one teleportation technique fell from 48% of 2016 releases to 18% of 2023 releases, while arm-tracked grabbing techniques such as climbing rose from 3% of 2016 releases to over 30% in each year from 2020 to 2023.

Taxonomy of techniques

A widely cited classification by Costas Boletsis (2017) groups VR locomotion into four types: motion-based, room scale-based, controller-based, and teleportation-based. The types are distinguished along three dimensions: the interaction type (physical body movement versus artificial input through a device), the VR interaction space (an open, effectively unbounded space versus a limited physical area), and the VR motion type (continuous movement versus non-continuous movement). Motion-based and room scale-based techniques rely on physical interaction, controller-based and teleportation-based techniques rely on artificial interaction, and teleportation is the only one of the four that produces non-continuous motion. The typology came out of a systematic review of empirical studies of VR locomotion techniques from 2014 to 2017, which identified 36 relevant articles and 73 instances of 11 locomotion techniques. Boletsis placed walking-in-place, redirected walking, arm swinging, gesture-based locomotion and reorientation in the motion-based type; real walking in the room scale-based type; joystick-based, human joystick, chair-based and head-directed locomotion in the controller-based type; and point and teleport in the teleportation-based type.

Other schemes are finer grained. Meta's design guidance lists teleportation, slide (smooth locomotion), freeform grab locomotion, embodied physics locomotion (climbing, diving, arm-swinging and grabbing objects to propel oneself), path locomotion along a predefined route, forced locomotion triggered by the environment, and steering locomotion of a vehicle. Locomotion Vault, a database and visualization presented at CHI 2021 by Massimiliano Di Luca, Hasti Seifi, Simon Egan and Mar Gonzalez-Franco, catalogs over 100 techniques from academia and industry and uses similarity between techniques to aid comparison; its analysis found an inherent trade-off between simulation sickness and accessibility across techniques.

In practice these categories map onto a smaller set of approaches: walking in a tracked physical space, mechanical aids such as omnidirectional treadmills, software techniques such as redirected walking, artificial (smooth) locomotion driven by a controller, teleportation, dash, gesture methods such as arm-swinging and walking-in-place, grabbing and climbing, and seated vehicle or cockpit movement.

Physical movement

The most direct method is real walking within the range of the positional tracking devices, commonly called room-scale VR. Valve's Lighthouse tracking system, demonstrated with the HTC Vive in 2015, places devices around a room to track a user's movement in 3D space. The consumer Vive, which shipped from 5 April 2016 with two Lighthouse base stations and two tracked controllers, was one of the first consumer systems built around room-scale tracking with SteamVR. PCWorld's launch review stated that with optimal placement it could track an area up to fifteen feet by fifteen feet. The main constraint is the size of the physical space: walls and furniture limit how far a user can advance. The original Oculus Rift CV1 and PlayStation VR launched with forward-facing tracking aimed more at seated and standing experiences than at walking across a room. Sony's PlayStation VR documentation described an ideal play area of about 6 by 10 feet with the player facing the PlayStation Camera, and advised players to remain seated whenever possible.

Standalone headsets with inside-out tracking removed the external sensors but kept the space requirement. Meta's support documentation for Meta Quest headsets asks for a safe, unobstructed space of at least 6.5 by 6.5 feet (2 by 2 metres) for roomscale use, and offers a Stationary Mode for sitting or standing in one place when less space is available. Apple's visionOS takes a stricter approach in its more immersive styles: the system defines a boundary about 1.5 metres from the initial position of the wearer's head, fades the experience toward passthrough as the head approaches it, and replaces the immersive visuals with the app's icon when the head moves beyond it.

Redirected walking is a software technique that lets a user explore a virtual space larger than the physical room by imperceptibly rotating or scaling the virtual scene so that a path that feels straight in VR becomes a curved or constrained path in reality. It was introduced by Razzaque, Kohn, and Whitton in 2001. Their version rotated the virtual scene about the user so that the user kept walking toward the farthest wall of the lab; in a pilot study built around a simulated fire drill, subjects explored a virtual room approximately twice the size of the tracker area. Later perceptual studies established detection thresholds for the manipulation. In psychophysical experiments with 12 subjects, Frank Steinicke and colleagues found that users could be turned physically about 49% more or 20% less than the perceived virtual rotation, that distances could be downscaled by 14% and upscaled by 26%, and that a straight virtual path could be bent onto a circular arc with a real-world radius greater than 22 m before users noticed. Large dedicated tracking areas are therefore still required for fully unconstrained redirected walking.

Omnidirectional treadmills aim to let a user walk or run indefinitely while remaining in place. The Omni, from the company Virtuix (founded by Jan Goetgeluk), popularized the consumer concept through a Kickstarter campaign that launched on 4 June 2013 with a 150,000 US dollar goal. NBC News reported that it passed the goal in three and a half hours, and the campaign went on to raise over 1.1 million US dollars from more than 3,200 backers. The Kickstarter design had a 48-inch base, an adjustable support ring and tracking hardware attached to each shoe. Virtuix later released a home model, the Virtuix Omni One. In October 2026 Virtuix listed it at 2,995 US dollars with a customized Pico headset (which Virtuix calls the Pico 4U), controllers, overshoes and foot trackers; the company states that it also works with the Meta Quest 2, Meta Quest 3 and Meta Quest 3S through its Omni Connect for Meta software. Virtuix gives its footprint as 48 by 60 by 48 inches and its supported users as 4 ft 4 in to 6 ft 4 in tall and up to 250 lb. Virtuix shares began trading on the Nasdaq Global Market under the ticker VTIX on 27 January 2026. A competing product line, the KAT Walk C 2, comes from KAT VR. In October 2026 the company's store listed the KAT Walk C 2 Plus Enhanced at 1,199 US dollars and the KAT Walk C 2 Core Enhanced at 799 US dollars. Foot-worn interfaces such as Cybershoes are another alternative to a treadmill.

Artificial (smooth) locomotion

Main article: Artificial locomotion

Artificial or "smooth" locomotion moves the virtual viewpoint continuously in response to a controller input, typically a thumbstick or trackpad, while the user remains physically still. It is familiar to players of conventional video games and allows free movement regardless of room size, but it is also a common trigger of cybersickness because the eyes perceive continuous motion that the inner ear does not. Meta recommends matching avatar speeds to real-world averages, about 3 mph (1.4 m/s) for walking and 6 mph (2.8 m/s) for running, to limit optic flow. Turning is usually offered as either continuous (smooth) rotation or snap turning, in which the view rotates in fixed increments such as 30, 45, or 90 degrees to reduce discomfort. In experiments by Yasin Farmani and Robert Teather, rotation snapping and translation snapping reduced Simulator Sickness Questionnaire scores by 40% for rotational and 50% for translational viewpoint movement, without significantly affecting presence, error rates or performance. Apple's visionOS guidelines go further and advise developers to generally avoid letting people rotate a virtual world, even under their own control, and to consider instantaneous directional changes during a quick fade-out instead.

A related option is the dash (also called shift), which quickly moves the player between positions. A 2021 review of teleportation research describes dash as a way to reduce the spatial disorientation of teleporting by adding a small amount of optical flow during the transition, and notes dash-like transitions in Raw Data and Half-Life: Alyx.

Teleportation

Main article: Teleportation

Teleportation moves the user instantly from one point to another, usually by pointing at a destination and confirming. Because it removes continuous optical flow, it largely eliminates the visual-vestibular mismatch, and a 2021 review describes it as a technique with a low risk of inducing VR sickness. In Robo Recall (2017), for example, the player pushes a thumbstick to launch a destination marker and rotates the stick to choose the direction they will face on arrival; Road to VR's review stated that the gameplay could not function without teleportation. The trade-offs are reduced spatial awareness, because the instantaneous jumps interrupt the motion cues the brain uses for path integration, and a weaker sense of presence compared with continuous movement. In a 2017 study by Julian Frommel and colleagues in which 24 participants explored a virtual zoo, free teleport caused the least discomfort and scored highest for enjoyment, presence and affective state among four controller-based methods (free teleport, fixpoint teleport, touchpad-based and automatic movement). Results are not uniform. In a study by Jeremy Clifton and Stephen Palmisano, steering was more sickening than teleporting on average, but 9 of 25 participants reported more severe sickness while teleporting, and the authors found some evidence that steering benefited presence.

Gesture-based methods

Several techniques use body gestures to drive movement without a treadmill. Walking-in-place detects stepping motions and converts them into forward travel. Implementations have used headset motion analysed by a neural network, an inexpensive accelerometer, or a single RGB camera. In Boletsis and Cedergren's 2019 comparison, walking-in-place offered the highest immersion but also high levels of psychophysical discomfort. Arm-swinging maps the back-and-forth motion of the hand controllers, usually while a grip or trigger is held, to walking or running speed. In a 2016 spatial-awareness experiment by Preston Tunnell Wilson and colleagues, walking in place was not as good as real walking but was better than arm swinging.

Grabbing and climbing

Grab-based techniques move the user by pulling on the world or on objects in it. Meta's documentation describes freeform grab locomotion, in which the world moves, rotates and scales as the user grabs and pulls, and embodied physics locomotion, which uses the avatar's hands, arms or virtual gear to climb, dive, swing the arms or push off objects. Climbing and arm-propelled movement became common in commercial games, as in Gorilla Tag, where players grip surfaces and propel themselves forward with their arms. Unity's XR Interaction Toolkit includes Grab Move, Two-Handed Grab Move and Climb providers alongside its teleportation, snap turn, continuous turn and continuous move providers.

Vehicle and cockpit movement

In seated experiences the user controls a virtual vehicle such as a car, aircraft, or mech; Meta calls this steering locomotion. Meta's comfort guidance suggests using geometry such as vehicle cabins, cockpits or headgear to obscure parts of the environment and reduce optic flow, and making peripheral geometry opaque in vehicles whose windows show outside motion. The surrounding cockpit can also act as a stable visual reference frame. The rest frame hypothesis holds that people are more prone to cybersickness when cues conflict about what is stationary, and Jerrold Prothero's experiments, summarized by Joseph LaViola, found that an independent visual background in agreement with inertial cues could reduce symptoms. A 2025 IEEE VR paper by Tongyu Nie and colleagues proposed "peripheral teleportation", a rest frame built from the current virtual scene and updated by the user's physical movement; in a between-subjects study with 90 participants that compared it with a conventional black field-of-view restrictor and an unrestricted control condition, peripheral teleportation significantly reduced discomfort and let participants stay immersed in the virtual environment for longer.

Cybersickness and comfort

Main article: Virtual reality sickness

Cybersickness is motion-induced discomfort, including nausea, disorientation, and eye strain, that can arise during VR locomotion. The dominant explanation is sensory conflict: the visual system signals self-motion that the vestibular system does not corroborate. LaViola's 2000 review called sensory conflict theory the oldest and most accepted account, and also described the poison theory and the postural instability theory of Riccio and Stoffregen. Contributing factors include lag between a user's action and the display update (see motion-to-photon latency), flicker, and a wide field of view; flicker becomes more noticeable as field of view grows because peripheral vision is more sensitive to it. In a 2002 driving-simulator study with 10 subjects at fields of view of 60, 100, 140 and 180 degrees, simulator sickness and presence scores rose with field of view and approached asymptotes beyond 140 degrees.

Common mitigations target the optical-flow cues that drive the conflict. Dynamic vignetting, or field-of-view restriction (see Dynamic FOV Reduction), darkens or crops the edges of the view during movement to limit the motion visible in the periphery. Ajoy Fernandes and Steven Feiner tested a subtle, dynamic field-of-view restrictor in a two-session study with 30 seated participants and reported that it reduced VR sickness and helped participants adapt without lowering their reported presence, while minimizing their awareness of the intervention. Snap turning replaces smooth rotation with discrete steps, and teleportation removes continuous motion entirely. A stable rest frame, such as a cockpit interior, gives the visual system an unmoving reference. Apple's guidelines suggest giving people a stationary frame of reference and avoiding motion at the edges of the field of view, where it can make people feel that they or their surroundings are moving. On the hardware and software side, Meta's guidance treats a consistent frame rate as crucial for comfort and notes that asynchronous timewarp can reduce judder but does not replace a solid frame rate. Tolerance also tends to build with repeated exposure: a review by Robert Kennedy, Kay Stanney and William Dunlap found that longer exposures produce more symptoms and that total sickness subsides over repeated sessions.

Empirical comparisons illustrate the trade-offs. In the study by Boletsis and Cedergren (2019), 26 adults performed a game-like task with walking-in-place, controller/joystick and teleportation; walking-in-place gave the highest immersion but high psychophysical discomfort, controller locomotion was perceived as easy to use because of users' familiarity with controllers, and teleportation was considered effective for fast navigation but its visual "jumps" broke the sense of immersion. A 2025 maze-navigation study by Hořejší and colleagues with 15 participants compared hand-tracked teleportation, conventional controllers and the Cybershoes foot interface. Teleportation produced the lowest cybersickness and Cybershoes the highest, with controller steering in between, while teleportation also had the longest maze completion times; the authors concluded that teleportation minimizes cybersickness but harms spatial orientation, and that joystick locomotion gave the best balance of efficiency, usability and comfort.

Comparison of common techniques

General characteristics of common VR locomotion techniques

Technique	Interaction type	Relative immersion	Relative comfort (cybersickness risk)	Additional hardware
Room-scale walking	Physical, continuous	High	High comfort (low risk)	None beyond a tracked play area
Redirected walking	Physical, continuous	High	High comfort (low risk)	Large tracking space
Omnidirectional treadmill	Physical, continuous	High	Moderate	Dedicated treadmill, harness, shoes
Artificial (smooth) locomotion	Artificial, continuous	Moderate	Lower comfort (higher risk)	None
Teleportation	Artificial, non-continuous	Lower	High comfort (low risk)	None
Dash / shift	Artificial, continuous (brief)	Moderate	Moderate to high comfort	None
Walking-in-place	Physical, continuous	High	Moderate (fatigue)	Optional sensor or camera
Arm-swinging	Physical, continuous	Moderate	Moderate	Tracked controllers
Vehicle / cockpit	Artificial, continuous	Moderate	Moderate (stable rest frame helps)	None

Immersion and comfort ratings above are general tendencies drawn from the cited comparative studies and design guidance; results vary with implementation, content, and the individual user.

Platform guidance

Meta's design guidelines for Meta Horizon OS recommend that apps let users choose between teleportation and slide for movement and between snap and smooth turning, default to the comfort-friendly options (teleport and snap turn) and let users opt in to slide and smooth turn, and allow these preferences to be changed in real time. Meta notes that locomotion preferences are app-specific: each application must implement its own settings menu, and there is no system-level preference. Its input maps also cover hand tracking: after a gating gesture, a microgesture thumb-tap triggers a teleport and a thumb-swipe left or right performs a snap turn. Meta's best-practice summary suggests offering three settings groups, "Recommended", "Comfortable" and "Advanced", and testing with diverse users.

In Unity, the XR Interaction Toolkit implements locomotion through providers that request movement from a Locomotion Mediator, which gives them access to an XR Body Transformer that moves the XR Origin. Apple's visionOS guidance concentrates on visual comfort in a Full Space: it asks developers to display motion in comfortable ways, to choose an immersion style that matches the movements people may make, and to use fades when relocating objects.

Research

Surveys and reviews map a large and growing field. Majed Al Zayer, Paul MacNeilage and Eelke Folmer's survey in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics aggregates research on virtual locomotion techniques and discusses their strengths, weaknesses and applicability. Boletsis's 2017 review found that research since the consumer revival had concentrated on technology and technical aspects more than on user experience, and that most studied techniques relied on physical motion cues. Anderton and colleagues found a gap between academia and industry: academic work focuses heavily on walking-based locomotion, while commercial applications with room-scale tracking most often pair it with conventional joystick sliding. They also found that the average application offers a growing number of locomotion techniques, and called for accessibility research beyond sickness mitigation. Locomotion Vault's finding of a trade-off between sickness and accessibility points the same way.

Input devices

3DRudder, Cyberith Virtualizer, KAT WALK, Omnideck, VRGO, VirZoom, Virtuix Omni

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See also

• Artificial locomotion
• Teleportation
• Redirected walking
• Walking-in-place
• Omnidirectional treadmill
• Snap Turn
• Smooth Turn
• Dynamic FOV Reduction
• Climbing
• Room-scale VR
• Vection
• Cybersickness