Critique on VR 360 Treadmill
The era of game development has been quite long, from the arcade, handheld, home console, mobile platform to virtual reality. Even with the advent virtual reality technology, there has always been a need to have a natural body moment to get a fully immersive experience and this kind of navigation was always a bottleneck for the VR experiences. To overcome this problem, many have come up with different techniques such as using controllers to navigate, designing a game such that it restricts the user to move around a limited space etc. that were discussed in class to tackle this drawback. However, these techniques impose a hard restriction on game designs because most of the applications cannot confine their movement to the limited space or the continuous hand movements can deteriorate the gameplay after some time. With the advent and development of virtual reality technology, people started to develop a series of gaming peripherals in order to achieve a truly all-around move and no game-wide limit and one such device are the Virtuix Omni which is essentially a 360 degree VR treadmill with a motion capture capability. The team has come up with a promising idea to negate the above discussed shortcomings.
In theory, a full range of treadmills is the best device to play virtual reality games. But is the reality so true? Let us explore the tech by understanding how this actually works along with its pros and cons. Omni virtuix has a disc base with a diameter of 120 cm with a concave center. Users need to wear special shoes to run on Omni's runway. The bottom of the shoe has a groove matching the cone which is used to stabilize the footsteps of the movement, to prevent the occurrence of position offset and other conditions. The pair of shoes at the tip also have very high friction to ensure that people can balance during exercise. The specially made Omni sensor on the shoe is truly high tech. The sensor records the person's location, how long his or her stride is and how fast he or she is moving. The Omni can then transmit data to the game, making a realistic simulation of the reality in the virtual world.
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Applications:​
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Omni can be used as a navigation device in the game. you can identify yourself walking, running, strafing, backward, sitting, and other postures and also tracks your distance traveled and calories consumption.
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Virtuix Omni allows you to run on any famous street in the world, and of course, you can bring more realistic gaming experience by letting you walk in your favorite scene.
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Ideal for shooting and running games.​
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it was used by NASA in conjunction with the Oculus Rift to create a virtual reality environment for exploring Mars on the Virtuix Omni to see a 360-degree panoramic view of Mars.​
Pros:​
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players can able to control the 360 ° walking and movement of game characters in real life.
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Currently, this is the best solution that works the best with virtual reality first-person perspective applications where users walk or run around and enjoy the environment.
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Best solution for the room-scale space constraints and unnatural navigation schemes like teleportation
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Eliminates the hack to develop games to confine the players moment to a limited space around.
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Real-time body movement tracking.
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Developers can use this device and the SDK to provide an appropriate haptic feedback while walking or running on the treadmill.​
Cons:​
Though treadmills are one of the best ways to address the problems pertaining to the navigation in virtual reality, there are still a lot of issues with this kind of technology. The product has received a huge criticism after its demo for many reasons.
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Many users have reported that the walking with shoes on the curved surface is very uncomfortable and doesn't give a feeling of walking in reality.
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There is a bit learning curve as you need to learn and adjust to the walking and running along with the harness around your waist.
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You need to put extra efforts to walk on the plate that can be tiresome and restricts the gameplay to a very short span.
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There is no support for the mobile VR which is the next big thing being focussed on.
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This might not fit for all kinds of personalities. Some might feel comfortable and some might feel uncomfortable based on their body structure.
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Leaving the above issues aside, the price is one of the biggest factor for the experience this tech is providing. It costs around $699 and that clearly shows that this is not for everyone.
Conclusion:​
The requirement for a good immersive VR experience with all the real-time navigation is ever growing concern and Virtuix Omni has come up into the picture addressing one of the key obstacles for the immersion into the VR: Freedom of movement inside virtual presence. Though there are a lot of advantages with this kind of technology, this still has a long way to go before it actually can take hold of the VR market. There is a room for improvement and hope some issues will be addressed in the upcoming generations of this product.
Omni Shoes
Omni Tracking pods
Omni Suite