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

TL;DR

Glide-in-Place is a lightweight, foot-steered VR locomotion system that enables continuous, hands-free movement in constrained environments by mapping foot pressure to differential drive, improving speed and comfort over existing methods.

Contribution

The paper introduces Glide-in-Place, a novel foot-controlled VR locomotion system that offers continuous, hands-free navigation suitable for constrained spaces, with a simple hardware design and effective control logic.

Findings

Glide-in-Place outperformed seated walking-in-place in speed and comfort.

Participants experienced less fatigue and physical demand with Glide-in-Place.

The system maintained comparable user satisfaction to joystick control.

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.