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.<\/p>\n
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<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n If you are interested, check out their website<\/a>. Click here for the video section!<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 … Continue reading The Virtuix Omni<\/span>