Hands-VRee: Towards Hands-Free Gaming in VR via Concurrent Input for Locomotion, Viewport Control, and Pointing

Abstract

Despite their growing popularity, VR games still largely rely on hand-based controls, yet many usage contexts make them impractical. To address this gap, we integrate (i) torso leaning for locomotion, (ii) dynamic head-gain rotation for viewport control, and (iii) gaze-pointing into Hands-VRee, a multimodal system for VR gaming. We evaluated the system in a study with concurrent navigation and pointing, varying two factors: pointing modality (eye- and head-gaze) and the presence of a dead zone for rotation. Participants successfully coordinated all three inputs while navigating obstacles and gazing at a target for approx. 79% of the trials. As expected, eye-gaze outperformed head-gaze in task completion time, dwell time, speed, usability, and preference. The dead zone proved beneficial for stabilisation during specific moments such as strafing, but its permanent activation negatively impacted the ability to continuously gaze at a target, travel speed, usability, workload, ease, and cybersickness. Our findings also suggest head-gaze remains a viable fallback when combined with appropriate design mitigations.