Ninja Run VR

Ninja Run VR
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Information
Type	Seated, Standing, Room-scale
Required Devices	Motion-tracked controllers in both hands
Description	Stretch both arms in the opposite direction of your desired movement while leaning in the same direction of desired movement
Pros	Continuous movement without teleporting; the developer states that it reduces simulator sickness
Cons	Takes time to travel, can be tiring over long distances
Creator	Sean Hall
Examples	Shaolinja

Ninja Run VR is a Locomotion Method for virtual reality in which the user holds both controller triggers, leans forward and sweeps both arms back, and the virtual viewpoint moves continuously in the direction of the lean. The farther the user leans, the faster they travel. It was created in 2016 by developer Sean Hall, who modeled the posture on the way fast-running ninjas are drawn in anime and martial arts films. Road to VR reported the technique under the names Shaolinja and "Ninja Running".

Hall released the technique as a paid plugin for the Unity engine in December 2016 and used it in Shaolinja, a free alpha of a first-person ninja fighting game that he submitted to Steam Greenlight. It was presented as an alternative to teleportation at a time when, according to Road to VR, VR titles that required user-controlled movement were settling on some form of teleportation, a method it described as effective against nausea but laborious over large distances.

Reviewed 27 September 2026. Checked the Unity Asset Store listing, the archived Shaolinja Greenlight page, the Road to VR, Hackaday and UploadVR articles, the YouTube oEmbed data and the PenguFly paper abstract against every new or changed claim. About review dates.

How it works

Developers add the technique to a Unity project by assigning the root of the VR play area and the tracked head and hands of the player to a "NinjaRun" component. In use, the player holds both triggers and leans forward with the hands held back. The player can look around while keeping the same movement vector, and steers by moving the body: turning the whole body or moving only the hands changes the direction of travel. According to the Shaolinja Greenlight description, holding the hands in front of the body or leaning back moves the player backwards, and "any direction of movement is achievable". Hackaday described the result as a movement system that "somewhat resembles skiing", in which the "head forward, arms swept back" position determines both the direction and the speed of movement.

The controls can be summarized as follows:

• To move, stretch both arms in the opposite direction of your desired movement while leaning in the same direction of desired movement.
• To change movement direction, lean in the desired direction.
• To move faster, place your hands closer to each other to make the "triangle" (your head to both of your hands) longer.
• To move slower, place your hands further apart to each other to make the "triangle" (your head to both of your hands) shorter.

Design rationale

Hall explained the idea to Road to VR: "In many popular anime and cartoons, characters depicted to be moving very fast are often illustrated with their hands and arms trailing their torso in the direction they are moving." He added that with his locomotion "the user is allowed the luxury of immersing themselves in a system where they possess that super power. Because moving is tied to muscles and the inner-ear, simulator sickness is profoundly reduced." The Unity Asset Store listing calls it "an intuitive and nausea-free locomotion system that does not involve teleporting or pointing the controller like a remote to move."

History

Hall had previously attracted attention for a do-it-yourself HoloLens project. He published under the name FultonX, the name on the Shaolinja Greenlight page and on the YouTube channel that posted the "Ninja Run VR Locomotion" demonstration video.

Date	Event
10 December 2016	Shaolinja posted on Steam Greenlight by FultonX
13 December 2016	NinjaRun VR Locomotion version 1.0 released on the Unity Asset Store (release timestamp 21:52 UTC; original Unity version 5.4.0)
14 December 2016	FultonX announces the Asset Store release on the Greenlight page
17 December 2016	Road to VR article on the technique; Hall adds it to the Greenlight page as an announcement
20 December 2016	Hackaday article on the technique

The Asset Store listing is published under the name Trapped Inside Games, priced at US$5.00, with a 31.3 KB download. As of September 2026 it is still listed, and version 1.0 from December 2016 is the latest release. Alongside the plugin, Hall released an alpha demo, distributed as a Dropbox download named ThrowFireballs, so players and developers could try the movement and decide whether to use it. The demo required SteamVR to be running. Road to VR wrote that he released it "in order to garner more feedback and to gauge whether other developers working on VR experiences would be interested in incorporating it."

Shaolinja

Shaolinja was the game project built around the technique. Its Greenlight page described it as "an early access prototype first person fighting game with ninja theme", listed for PC in single-player and multi-player modes, and said any Greenlight votes would go toward distributing the game through Early Access while it stayed free. The Greenlight page listed the following features of the alpha:

• Maps "designed for miles of running", including stairs and hills.
• Online fights using fists, thrown fireballs, dodging and shields; a player hit ten times by fireballs respawns.
• Blocking by squeezing both fists and crossing the arms, and jumping by kneeling with the left hand on the ground and aiming an arc cast from the right hand.
• An experimental, rudimentary form of redirected walking: when the player walks into the edge of the play area, the view goes dark, and after turning 180 degrees in place the player continues in the original virtual direction.

At that stage, network functions such as lobby and room creation had to be clicked with a mouse on the desktop monitor before putting on the headset. Planned additions included smoke bombs, ninja stars, grappling hooks, elemental weapons, online ranking and racing.

Reception

Road to VR's Paul James wrote that the technique "may well look, well, a little 'batshit crazy'", but concluded that "the more I thought about it, the more I reckon Sean may be onto something." Hackaday reported that Hall found the posture "both immersive and intuitive" and that it "felt more like having a super power", and presented the project as an example of hobbyist experimentation with VR movement.

Related techniques

In May 2017 the studio CapitolaVR described a rapid prototype built around a locomotion technique it called "Ninja Run", in a guest column on UploadVR by its head of digital, David Robustelli. The controls were the same: hold both triggers, lean forward with the hands held back, and lean further to go faster. The prototype put the player in a procedurally generated bamboo forest with two katanas. It added a trigger-activated boost that jumps the player in the looking direction and resets existing velocity into that direction, a wind-stream tunnel-vision effect, and a second trigger that slows time and temporarily unhooks the controllers from the locomotion system. Robustelli wrote that the prototype "ended up to be a very comfortable and satisfying experience."

An earlier research technique, PenguFly, also derived travel from the positions of the head and both hands. In PenguFly, presented by Anette von Kapri, Tobias Rick and Steven Feiner at the 2011 IEEE Virtual Reality Conference, the head and hand positions are projected onto the ground, and travel direction and speed come from the vector between the midpoint of the projected hands and the projected head. In a between-subject experiment in a CAVE, the authors found no significant differences in reported presence or usability compared with two pointing-based techniques, but a significant increase in nausea with PenguFly. Travel accuracy, measured as a coin-to-distance ratio, was higher with PenguFly.

See also

• ArmSwinger
• Lean-To-Move
• Teleportation
• Redirected walking
• VR sickness

External links

• Steam page: Shaolinja on Steam Greenlight
• Unity Asset Store: NinjaRun VR Locomotion