The Virtuix Omni VR treadmill made us all hot and sweaty

Stand-up device is sprinting toward a Q1 2015 release—and a price bump.

Lee Hutchinson – Jan 7, 2015 1:12 pm | 74

CES 2015 was also the stage for v2 of the Virtuix VR treadmill. As Lee Hutchinson put it, "WELCOME TO THE FUTURE. MAN, MACHINE, THE FUTURE." Credit: Lee Hutchinson

There have been big changes to the Virtuix Omni since we last strapped ourselves into a wooden prototype back in July 2013. At the time, the Houston-based company was wrapping up a successful Kickstarter campaign and still had quite a few details to finalize on its product, a large stand-up VR treadmill that a person steps inside of and runs around in with some fashion of head-mounted display strapped to his or her face. More than a year later, the almost-finalized version of the Omni VR treadmill we got to try out was leaps and bounds improved over the prototype we last tried.

The heavy, powder-coated steel device weighs 140 pounds (about 65 kg), according to Virtuix CEO Jan Goetgeluk, and it features a flat, segmented plastic surface that the user stands on while wearing special shoes. The shoes have plastic insets on the bottom that let the shoes glide in a mostly frictionless way over the platform’s surface. The user’s weight (up to a maximum of 285 pounds, or about 130 kg) is borne by a harness that the user straps into, which in turn rests on a waist-high plastic ring surrounding the wearer. By letting the harness take up most of your weight, you’re able to move your feet back and forth across the surface in a mostly comfortable walking motion; you can also turn 360 degrees.

Unlike the prototype, which used a Microsoft Kinect to track the user’s motions, the near-final Omni keeps track of your feet with special inertial sensor “pods” that clip into the tops of the shoes; sensors in the base of the Omni’s support pillars register your footsteps from the pods’ movements and translate your pace into an analog thumbstick axis. Walk slowly in real life, and your in-game avatar walks slowly. Run, and your in-game avatar runs. The Omni connects via USB or Bluetooth to a computer (PC-only, no consoles yet) and presents itself as a standard input device.

We played a brief demo that had us running around in a building shooting pop-up targets, and the direction the avatar was facing was controlled solely by the rotation of the system’s attached Oculus Rift DK2 (the Omni is display-agnostic—it can connect to a variety of different head-mounted displays). Goetgeluk explained that head tracking and directional tracking can be uncoupled by developers, but for the CES demo, the company elected to simply have the direction your head pointed be the direction your avatar faced.

The demo lasted probably three minutes, but in the packed South Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center, that was more than enough to work up a bit of a sweat—it was pretty much like I’d been sprinting on and off for three full minutes (which doesn’t sound too long, but try it in a hot room—you’ll get a little damp). Most first-person shooter games would be opportunities for pretty intense workouts when used with the Omni, which is a potentially interesting avenue for sedentary folks who like to game and want to be more active.

For now, the big device costs $499, but as of February 1, Virtuix will be raising the price to $699. Delivery of units is expected to start in the first quarter of 2015.