Virtual reality has achieved significant popularity in recent years, and allowing users to move freely within an immersive virtual world has become an important factor critical to realize. The user’s interactions are generally designed to increase the perceived realism, but the locomotion techniques and how these affect the user’s task performance still represent an open issue, much discussed in the literature. In this article, we evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of, and user preferences relating to, freehand locomotion techniques designed for an immersive virtual environment performed through hand gestures tracked by a sensor placed in the egocentric position and experienced through a head-mounted display. Three freehand locomotion techniques have been implemented and compared with each other, and with a baseline technique based on a controller, through qualitative and quantitative measures. An extensive user study conducted with 60 subjects shows that the proposed methods have a performance comparable to the use of the controller, further revealing the users’ preference for decoupling the locomotion in sub-tasks, even if this means renouncing precision and adapting the interaction to the possibilities of the tracker sensor.

近年来，虚拟现实已获得了极大的普及，允许用户在身临其境的虚拟世界中自由移动已成为实现这一目标的重要因素。用户的交互通常被设计为增加感知的真实感，但是运动技术以及这些技术如何影响用户的任务表现仍然是一个公开的问题，在文献中有很多讨论。在本文中，我们评估了专为沉浸式虚拟环境设计的徒手运动技术的效率和有效性，以及与用户的偏好有关，这些技术是通过放置在以自我为中心的位置的传感器跟踪并通过头戴式显示器体验的手势来执行的。实施了三种徒手移动技术，并将它们相互比较，并使用基于控制器的基线技术，通过定性和定量方法。对60个主题进行的广泛用户研究表明，所提出的方法具有与使用控制器相当的性能，进一步揭示了用户在子任务中将运动分离的偏好，即使这意味着放弃精确性并使交互适应于跟踪器传感器的可能性。