Floating Hamster Ball: A Locomotion Method for Free Flight in Virtual Environments

3D navigation is an important task in many virtual reality applications. Several virtual reality locomotion techniques were introduced in the literature trying to obtain a navigation with high quality and comfort, avoiding cybersickness. In this work, we propose a hands-free locomotion technique which uses intuitive mechanics with a considerable level of accuracy. Our method is inspired in a hamster ball, where the user has to roll a sphere from its interior in order to move in a 3d space. We evaluate three variants of our method in order to obtain a desired configuration. Objective and subjective measurements were applied to compare efficiency, user experience and cybersickness.