Virtual Locomotion: A Survey

Virtual reality (VR) has enjoyed significant popularity in recent years. Where navigation has been a fundamental appeal of 3D applications for decades, facilitating this in VR has been quite a challenge. Over the past decades, various virtual locomotion techniques (VLTs) have been developed that aim to offer natural, usable and efficient ways of navigating VR without inducing VR sickness. Several studies of these techniques have been conducted in order to evaluate their performance in various study conditions and virtual contexts. Taxonomies have also been proposed to either place similar techniques in meaningful categories or decompose them to their underlying design components. In this survey, we aim to aggregate and understand the current state of the art of VR locomotion research and discuss the design implications of VLTs in terms of strengths, weaknesses and applicability.