Glide-in-Place: Foot-Steered Differential-Drive for Hands-Free VR Locomotion

2026-04-11

AI Summary

This study addresses the lack of lightweight, hands-free, and continuously steerable locomotion techniques for seated virtual reality (VR) by proposing a foot-controlled navigation method inspired by self-balancing scooters. Treating the user’s feet as virtual wheels, the system employs thin insole sensors to capture real-time anterior-posterior pressure distributions, which are mapped to a differential-drive model to enable unified, continuous control of both translation and yaw rotation—eliminating the need for handheld devices or discrete mode switching. This work represents the first application of a differential-drive model to seated foot-based VR navigation, integrating low-burden sensing with a lightweight calibration algorithm into a compact, deployable hardware-control co-design. A user study with 16 participants demonstrates that, compared to seated redirected walking, the proposed method significantly improves navigation speed while reducing physical effort and discomfort, achieving performance comparable to hand-controller-based navigation—all while keeping the user’s hands free.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Game Design — Virtual Humans, NPCs and Autonomous Characters
• Intelligent Robots: Localization, Mapping, and Navigation
• Computer Vision: Low Level & Physics-based Vision

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Practical large-scale studies of user experience
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Virtualization and resource management in Web systems and infrastructures

Abstract

Seated VR locomotion in constrained environments, including homes, offices, and transit settings, calls for hardware that is lightweight and deployable, steering that remains continuous enough for curved motion, and a control channel that leaves the hands free for concurrent interaction. Inspired by the steering logic of self-balancing scooters, we present Glide-in-Place, a seated foot locomotion system that maps per-foot fore-aft pressure to a differential-drive model: the two feet act as virtual wheels whose relative drive continuously determines translation and yaw. This lets users move forward, rotate in place, and follow arcs in one unified vocabulary without hand-held input or discrete mode switches. We evaluated Glide-in-Place in a counterbalanced within-subject study with 16 participants against two baselines: joystick control and a seated walking-in-place technique with discrete snap motions. Across two steering-heavy navigation tasks, zig-zag path following with multitasking and curved-path traversal, Glide-in-Place was consistently faster than Seated-WIP, reduced physical demand, and lowered fatigue-related discomfort without significantly differing from joystick control on total VRSQ. We position Glide-in-Place as a deployable hardware-control design point for constrained seated VR: thin insole sensing, continuous foot steering, and lightweight calibration packaged in one compact artifact.

Problem

• seated VR locomotion
• hands-free interaction
• continuous steering
• constrained environments
• foot-controlled navigation

Innovation

• foot-steered locomotion
• differential-drive model
• hands-free VR
• seated virtual reality
• continuous steering