Natural Locomotion VR

About This Software

IMPORTANT: NOT SUPPORTED IN OCULUS RIFT YET. Only the demo works properly in the Rift.

IMPORTANT: IN PUBLIC BETA UNTIL 14-APR. Expect many bugs!

Move naturally in VR in any game that supports trackpad/stick locomotion. Walk in place to move your body in the virtual world, instead of sliding on your invisible remote-controlled skate.

Natural Locomotion is an application that emulates the controller trackpad (to use in any game), to move more naturally swinging the arms and moving the body. It includes a driver for SteamVR for this purpose.

Other “arm swinger” implementations are very “jumpy”, very slow to respond, or are a complement on button actions. Natural Locomotion uses a novel system designed to walk and run continuously, and with very precise and intuitive control of speed and acceleration. You can start, stop or change speed very quickly without “move” or “brake” buttons, it just depends on the speed you move your arms.

It comes with presets for several popular games and apps. Just select one and play. The profile manager allows you to make profiles for games not already included.

The demo version doesn’t have any driver and it’s just a photogrammetry scene to walk around, and a friendly robot that fools around, moving with this same locomotion system.

Software requirements:

• Desktop view from VR. UI is shown with big buttons and big text.
• A recent version of SteamVR (i.e. any except the temporary branch).
• SteamVR games or apps that has full directed “smooth locomotion” with trackpad or joystick (i.e. one can choose both direction and speed with the thumb).

Natural Locomotion doesn’t provide comfort options by itself (FoV reduction, etc), that’s dependent on each game. If you need it, make sure the games you want to play have the feature and is enabled. From our tests and from all comments after release, the 1:1 movement of Natural Locomotion avoids motion sickness, although we need a much bigger sample size to claim that for sure.

Oculus and WMR users: Natural Locomotion doesn’t work properly in games, speed control and angles are all wrong and the experience is bad. It will be fixed before support is enabled in the store; click “follow” and stay tuned. It will also come with control remapping extras, for those games that weren’t that well tested in your headset (if at all). Oculus Store games may work through a compatibility layer.