Two weeks prior to their now-successful Kickstarter, Virtuix brought the Omni VR treadmill to LA to show to a room full of VR enthusiasts. The full session has been posted online. In addition to seeing the Omni in action, you’ll see Virtuix CEO Jan Goetgeluk and the venerable Simon Solotko answer questions about the omnidirectional treadmill and philosophize about VR.
Above you can see a summary video of the event. Below you can find the full event (1 hour and 23 minutes). I actually watched the whole thing — well worth it for the interesting Q&A.
Those following along in the VR space will recognize James Iliff and Nathan Burba, Producer and Director, respectively, of Project Holodeck. They stopped by the Virtuix Omni Live event to see it in person. I asked Iliff what he thought.
“The Omni is pretty cool! We are on the other side of the camp regarding the VR locomotion problem, but as far as omni-directional treadmills are concerned I think its a breakthrough solution. We built Project Holodeck based around the idea that two or more players can intimately share a space together and physically / virtually interact with each other’s avatars. Locomotion devices are inevitably isolating – which is why we haven’t favored it on our own game development. But if you want to walk / run long distances in VR by yourself, the Omni is great for that,” Iliff told me.
He told me that the Omni is a breakthrough for omnidirectional treadmills, even outside of gaming.
“Outside games or entertainment, the Omni is an a big step forward in terms of omni-directional treadmills themselves – this is something scientists and engineers have been trying to work out for decades, and this new passive inexpensive solution should work great for many researchers as well.”
Project Holodeck was originally going to use a multi-Kinect system (four, to be exact) to track player movement in their platform, but found that the Kinect wasn’t suitable for their purpose; it works well for the Omni’s purpose though.
“The use of the Kinect (or an IR camera) with the Omni is a great example for what the Kinect is good for – being a gestural interface. The Kinect isn’t animating the players’ avatar in real time, that would require much more precise tracking. The Kinect is reading broad leg gestures and translating them into keyboard strokes, which is more like what the Kinect is designed to do.”
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