It is well-established how visual stimuli and self-motion in laboratory conditions reliably elicit retinalimage-stabilizing compensatory eye movements (CEM). Their organization and roles in natural-task gaze strategies is much less understood: are CEM applied in active sampling of visual information in human locomotion in the wild? If so, how? And what are the implications for guidance? Here, we directly compare gaze behavior in the real world (driving a car) and a fixed base simulation steering task. A strong and quantifiable correspondence between self-rotation and CEM counter-rotation is found across a range of speeds. This gaze behavior is "optokinetic", i.e. optic flow is a sufficient stimulus to spontaneously elicit it in naïve subjects and vestibular stimulation or stereopsis are not critical. Theoretically, the observed nystagmus behavior is consistent with tracking waypoints on the future path, and predicted by waypoint models of locomotor control-but inconsistent with travel point models, such as the popular tangent point model. Consider traveling in a textured environment at very high speed-for example rushing down a race track or an autobahn at 120+ mph; sledding down an olympic luge chute; a crazy headfirst plummet in a bungee jump. The visual field a blur, eyes and concentration totally focused on where you are going. But at moderate speeds-the more sedate pace in which our sensory physiology evolved and where most of our lives are still spent-our experience is of a sharp, "unblurred", and visually stable world. What is the basis of this visual stability? There are central mechanisms for visual stability, such as saccadic suppression 1,2 and remapping of receptive fields 3 , but active gaze strategies structuring the retinal input can also play a part. Our oculomotor system has a suite of reflexes and action patterns such as optokinetic response (OKR), vestibulo-ocular response (VOR), smooth pursuit and vergence that potentially could be used to stabilize the retinal image-and thus directly contribute to the experience of stability and focus. Indeed, in the laboratory studies of slow eye movements (SEM), it is commonly taken as given-if not definitional-that "in the wild" the job of these mechanisms is to prevent the retinal image from blurring and keep (relevant portions of) the visual world sharp and in focus. For reviews on these "compensatory eye movements" (CEM) see 4-7. We investigated the presence and parametric behavior of CEM in real and simulated high-speed locomotion (steering a bend). The theoretical rationale is that different visual steering models in the literature assume different gaze strategies. A travel-point strategy means the you hold gaze fixed, relative to the locomotor reference frame of the torso (or vehicle). Gaze lands on a point, say 20 m ahead on the path of travel, which travels along with you, so that the point your gaze lands on sweeps along the road as you move. A waypoint strategy, on the other hand, means the you fixate a point on the road, a specific location in t...