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.

Rehabilitation plays a crucial role in cancer care, as the functioning of cancer survivors is frequently compromised by impairments that can result from the disease itself but also from the long-term sequelae of the treatment. Nevertheless, the current literature shows that only a minority of patients receive physical and/or cognitive rehabilitation. This lack of rehabilitative care is a consequence of many factors, one of which includes the transportation issues linked to disability that limit the patient’s access to rehabilitation facilities. The recent COVID-19 pandemic has further shown the benefits of improving telemedicine and home-based rehabilitative interventions to facilitate the delivery of rehabilitation programs when attendance at healthcare facilities is an obstacle. In recent years, researchers have been investigating the benefits of the application of virtual reality to rehabilitation. Virtual reality is shown to improve adherence and training intensity through gamification, allow the replication of real-life scenarios, and stimulate patients in a multimodal manner. In our present work, we offer an overview of the present literature on virtual reality-implemented cancer rehabilitation. The existence of wide margins for technological development allows us to expect further improvements, but more randomized controlled trials are needed to confirm the hypothesis that VRR may improve adherence rates and facilitate telerehabilitation.