Pull

Pull
Information
Type	Seated, Standing, Room-scale
Required Devices	Tracked controllers or hand tracking
Description	Pulling the environment around you with your hands.
Pros	Fine-grained, precise positioning; travel speed and distance follow the user's own hand movement; rated low for nausea in the Locomotion Vault database
Cons	Physically tiring; slow for covering large virtual environments; rated high workload in a study of users with upper-body motor impairments
Examples	Google Earth VR, Lone Echo, Echo Arena

Pull is a Locomotion Method for virtual reality (VR) in which the user moves by grabbing the virtual environment, or a point in the air, and pulling it toward themselves, so that the viewpoint travels in the opposite direction to the hand. The technique is catalogued as "Grab and Pull" in the Locomotion Vault database of VR locomotion techniques, and similar schemes are known as "grabbing the air", "grab movement" and "freeform grab locomotion".

Pull uses tracked motion controllers or hand tracking, and it belongs to a wider family of grab-based techniques that also includes climbing, zero-gravity push-off movement and hand walking. Grab-based locomotion has spread quickly in commercial VR software: a 2024 review of 330 widely used VR applications found arm-tracked grabbing techniques in 3% of titles released in 2016 and in over 30% of titles in each year from 2020 to 2023.

Reviewed 27 September 2026. Checked every cited source (Locomotion Vault dataset, Unity XRI and Meta developer docs, HBO patent US11301110B2, InformIT textbook excerpt, Bowman et al. 2001, Anderton et al. 2024 full text, ASSETS/VRST/SAP abstracts, Road to VR and Google Earth Blog articles) against the claims, quotes, dates and figures. About review dates.

How it works

The user pulls the environment around them with their hands. In the Locomotion Vault description, the user presses a controller button while holding the controller anywhere, which "attaches" the position of the world to the controller; moving the controller then moves the point of view, and releasing the button detaches the world. Drawing the hand toward the body moves the user toward the grabbed point, and a push motion moves the user away from it.

Game engine toolkits ship this behavior as a ready-made component. Unity's XR Interaction Toolkit describes its Grab Move Provider as a "Locomotion provider that allows the user to move with one hand as if grabbing the whole world around them. When the controller moves, the XR Origin counter-moves in order to keep the controller fixed relative to the world." The component has a Move Factor setting (the ratio of actual movement distance to controller movement distance) and separate switches for unconstrained movement along the x, y and z axes, so a developer can restrict the user to the ground plane or allow free flight. A two-handed version uses the vector from the left hand to the right hand to set yaw rotation and uniform scale, with configurable minimum and maximum user scale. Meta's design guidance for Meta Horizon OS describes freeform grab locomotion in similar terms: "As you grab and pull, the world moves, rotates, and scales with your motion, altering your perspective." Meta lists productivity apps and world-scaling games as examples.

Some designs limit where the user can grab. A patent granted to Home Box Office in 2022 describes "pull targets", interactive objects in the scene that act as grab handles. When the user grabs a pull target and pulls the controller back, the perceived position moves toward the target "as if the environment is being pulled to the user", and the movement can be gradual, relative to the speed of the pull or push. In "Point-Tugging", a method described in a 2018 study, users "reach and pull the controller trigger at a point in front of them and move in the direction of the point they 'tug' with the controller."

History

Hand-driven travel predates consumer VR headsets. The textbook 3D User Interfaces: Theory and Practice describes Polyshop (later Multigen's Smart Scene; Mapes and Moshell, 1995), an early virtual environment application in which all interaction used hand postures and gestures. Its users could move forward "by pinching an imaginary rope and pulling herself along it", which the book calls the "grabbing the air" technique. A 2001 overview of 3D interface design by Doug Bowman, Ernst Kruijff, Joseph LaViola and Ivan Poupyrev listed "manual viewpoint manipulation" as one of five common travel metaphors, with the example that the user "grabs the air" and pulls himself along as if with a virtual rope.

Consumer headsets with six-degrees-of-freedom tracked controllers brought the technique into games and applications. Locomotion Vault dates its Grab and Pull entry to 2016. Google Earth VR, released for the HTC Vive in November 2016, let users "grab the earth below you and drag it along to move from one town to the next", in the words of Road to VR's launch report. Ready at Dawn's Lone Echo, previewed to the press in October 2016 and released for the Oculus Rift with Oculus Touch on 20 July 2017, used a zero-gravity version: players reach out and grab any object or surface, "be it a railing, or another floating human, and push off the object in order to propel yourself." Road to VR's review summed up the scheme as "grabbing the world and flinging yourself" and noted that the free multiplayer game Echo Arena, launched alongside Lone Echo, uses the same scheme.

Home Box Office filed a US patent application titled "Pull locomotion in a virtual reality environment" on 30 May 2019, claiming priority from 27 December 2018, with Robert McMurray as inventor. It was published in July 2020 as US20200210050A1 and granted on 12 April 2022 as US11301110B2. The patent's background section says teleportation "helps users avoid motion sickness" but is "basically instant", so the user never experiences motion. Locomotion Vault cites the published application in its Grab and Pull entry. The database itself was built by researchers from the University of Birmingham, the University of Copenhagen and Microsoft Research and presented at the CHI 2021 conference.

Related grab techniques

Locomotion Vault places Grab and Pull in a "grab" category with several related techniques. The descriptions and example titles below are the database's own.

Technique	How it works (per Locomotion Vault)	Examples listed
Grab and Pull	Button press attaches the world to the controller; moving the controller moves the point of view	Art of Fight and others
Grab + No Gravity	Grab the environment and push off to move in 3D; inertia continues the motion until the next grab	Lone Echo, Mission ISS
Climbing	Grab walls and objects with the triggers and pull up; letting go makes the player fall	Climbey, The Climb
Hand Walking	Controllers act as feet on the floor; the player can jump by pushing off the environment	Lucid Trips, To the Top
Focal Point VR	Grip and drag the environment for short moves; place two focal points to rotate, scale and translate the world for long moves	None listed
World in Miniature	Grab the world with one hand to move; shrink and turn it with two hands	Landfall, Brass Tactics, Skyworld
Grappling Hook	Fire a hook at the environment and swing on the rope	Windlands, Tower Tag

Adoption

Anderton and colleagues at Birmingham City University reviewed the locomotion options in 330 of the most used VR applications released from 2016 to 2023 on Steam, Meta, Oculus, Viveport and SideQuest, using the Locomotion Vault categories. Grab and Pull appeared in 20 applications (6.1%), climbing in 46 (13.9%) and hand walking in 11 (3.3%); in total, 77 applications included at least one grab technique. Over the same period, the share of new titles offering at least one teleportation technique fell from 48% in 2016 to 18% in 2023. The average number of grab techniques per application rose every year:

Release year	Average grab techniques per application
2016	0.03
2017	0.13
2018	0.17
2019	0.22
2020	0.28
2021	0.40
2022	0.59
2023	0.77

The authors noted that, in the Locomotion Vault data, grab had consistently been the second least explored category in terms of newly introduced techniques, and called for accessibility research to ensure that "potentially difficult to perform bimanual grabbing motions are flexible and adaptable to varied needs".

Research

Coomer, Bullard, Clinton and Williams-Sanders compared joystick movement, arm-cycling, point-tugging and teleportation in a search task in a large virtual environment, presented at the 2018 ACM Symposium on Applied Perception. They concluded that arm-cycling had advantages over the other methods.

Franzluebbers and Johnsen, at VRST 2023, combined teleportation with a grab-pull scheme to cover both long-distance and high-precision movement, and implemented it for tracked controllers and for free-hand tracking. In their user study, grab-pull gave more benefit where smaller, more precise positioning was required. Controller tracking was faster than hand tracking, but all participants could use the system with both interfaces.

Franz, Yu and Wobbrock tested six seated techniques with 19 participants who have upper-body motor impairments (ASSETS 2023). Participants performed poorly with, and reported a high workload for, the three techniques that required arm, head and torso movement: Chicken Acceleration, Grab and Pull, and Throw Teleport. Teleport was consistently favored in interviews. The authors also found that enjoyment, exercise and presence sometimes outweighed accessibility in participants' preferences.

Problems

Pull locomotion is physically demanding. Bowman and colleagues wrote that manual viewpoint manipulation techniques "can be efficient and easy to learn, but can also cause fatigue." Locomotion Vault rates Grab and Pull high for energy and low for accessibility, and rates it low for speed and for suitability to large virtual environments. The ASSETS 2023 study found poor performance and high perceived workload with Grab and Pull among users with upper-body motor impairments.

Visually induced discomfort can also occur, particularly in zero-gravity variants. In an early hands-on with Lone Echo, Road to VR wrote that zero-g movement "will be alien to most people, and so nausea is a risk." Locomotion Vault rates its Grab + No Gravity technique high for nausea, and Grab and Pull low.

Solutions

Designers have paired pull with other methods. The VRST 2023 design used teleportation for long distances and grab-pull for precise positioning. Two-handed variants such as Unity's Two-Handed Grab Move Provider can also rotate and uniformly scale the user, and the Move Factor setting in the one-handed provider changes how far the user travels for each unit of hand movement.

For comfort, a Lone Echo developer told Road to VR that slow acceleration, "one of the primary agitators of motion sickness in VR", was mostly removed, with velocity ramping up almost instantly, and the writer could detect no artificial rotation, with the player turning physically. Road to VR's review later called the scheme "exceedingly comfortable as a locomotion scheme" and noted that elements in the player's peripheral vision help anchor the player to the world. Google Earth VR has a comfort mode that shrinks the view while the user is flying, reducing peripheral vision to lower visually induced motion sickness. Meta's Interaction SDK climbing locomotion, which "inverts the interaction and routes the grab deltas back to the player locomotor" instead of moving the grabbed object, offers dynamic body alignment, which eases the alignment of the hand and the grabbed object; the documentation says this "prevents jarring transitions such as instantly snapping to a new position."

See also

• Locomotion
• Artificial locomotion
• Climbing
• Teleportation
• Focal Point VR
• ArmSwinger
• Walking-in-place
• VR sickness