Virtual reality in gaming is something that has been tried before, with little mainstream success. I would say that the best applications are the Microsoft Kinect and Nintendo Wii. Both work well, but haven’t fully caught on. When I was at Launch Conference in San Fransisco last week, there was a booth for the Virtuix Omni. It was the easily the most popular booth, for a couple of reasons. First, they were at a tech conference; but even more importantly, it was an amazing piece of technology. When I first saw it I thought it would just be another hoaky VR tool, but it looked very responsive and easy to use. Virtuix unfortunately didn’t let us try – they just demo’d it themselves.

There were two core components in the demo: an Oculus Rift and the Omni itself. I will not go into details about the Oculus rift, but they were playing a Half Life 2 port on it. The people talking described the Omni as a joystick that could be used in place of any joystick or d-pad. The user is supported by a harness which, combined with the Rift, allows you to naturally look around (“right joystick”). Wearing special low-friction shoes, you walk on a platform that has around 40 sensors that track the direction you are moving (“left joystick”). I am sure there is a learning curve, but the Virtuix employees made it look very easy, and natural. When they started walking, their player moved immediately. When they turned, their character turned. I was very impressed.

At the conference they also had a Kinect set up, for testing. They were trying to see how accurate the kinect was at tracking skeletal data, to improve the experience of the Omni even more.

If you are interested, check out their website. Click here for the video section!