The invention discloses a space calibrating body and method based on a virtual ball. According to the space calibrating body and method based on the virtual ball, calibration is conducted in the form that a standard bar piece is separated from a base, a laser tracker is adopted to serve as measurement equipment, and a hard aluminum alloy plate is adopted by the base to serve as an installation platform of the standard bar piece. The space calibrating method based on the virtual ball comprises the steps that the space calibrating body which has three degrees of freedom is manufactured firstly, threads are machined at the two ends of the standard bar piece, one end of the standard bar piece is fixed to the hard aluminum alloy plate, the other end of the standard bar piece is used for fixing the body of the virtual ball, a regular octahedron with the top end cut off serves as the body of the virtual ball, a cone nest is machined on each face of the virtual ball, and then the virtual ball is calibrated with the laser tracker serving as the measurement equipment. The space calibrating body and method based on the virtual ball have the advantages that the precision is high, machining requirements for the standard piece are low, the number of needed sampling points is small when the space calibrating body and method are used, the calibrating efficiency is improved, and the sampling workload is greatly reduced and the calibrating efficiency is improved when an articulated type coordinate measuring machine is calibrated.