The whole point of VR is to transport you to other universes, but that's pretty hard
to do when getting sucked back into this one is as easy as-
Ah!
That's the problem Virtuix has been trying to solve since they first invited me to their
Seattle hotel room to show me their prototype 11 years ago, like, before Luke was called
Luke. Now, the road's been a little bumpy.
They're a successful Kickstarter campaign that finally delivered the original Omni to
their backers. Years behind schedule, Virtuix immediately abandoned their efforts to build a consumer-friendly
version and pivoted to working with commercial operators like Dave and Buster's instead.
But now, they are back with a revamped version for end users dubbed the Omni One.
Again, a few years behind schedule, but they made it.
And as someone who has made his fair share of years late products, I gotta say, I'm
proud of them for getting it across the finish line. The only question is, in a world where not even Apple can get people excited about VR,
does anyone still care? I know what they do care about.
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at checkout with code LTT20. I gotta say, after my first go-through, it is way better than the last time I tried this.
Now, obviously, this is not a perfect solution by any stretch of the imagination, but compared
to every solution that I've seen before, you know, using your joystick to point you
or being in a very confined space or investing in an entire room with motion-tracking paint
lines all over it and the game is designed to make sure that you don't accidentally
run yourself into a wall.
If you want mobility in VR and you don't mind paying in sweat, I was in there for 8 minutes
and, more importantly, I want to go back in.
But first, let's take a step back.
The Omni-1 comes in two very heavy boxes, but aside from the weight, it is surprisingly
easy and intuitive to set up and take apart, which shows their experience as a B2B solutions
provider. Slide some things till they click and you've got this, a bowl, which we'll look at more
closely in a moment, and a kind of weird ARM-na-harness thing.
The ARM is height-adjustable from 4 foot 4 inches to 6 foot 4 inches and the bowl can
handle up to 250 pounds, which, yes, includes jumping on it.
Overall, the thing feels shockingly quality for something that was at a science fair project
grade the last time that I saw it. The ARM articulates in three places and rotates around the base, locking and unlocking with
this button right here. There's a knob up here that controls tension, and for a beginner of my weight, they recommend
setting the tension to 3. This affects how much it supports you versus how much it gives you free movement.
As for how it holds you up, the Omni-1 uses more of a backpack-like system with a waist
strap, chest strap, and two shoulder straps that provide a shockingly robust and safe feeling
level of support. It can also be pulled apart and even have the stuffing removed for cleaning, which,
uh, it'll need. The base has wheels for rolling it around and the step conceals a little storage compartment
for any accessories you might need, like, I don't know, what is this, a scrubby pad for
the dish? They recommend cleaning this every single time before you use it.
Not with the scrubby pad, but with a microfiber cloth that they included.
They also have a monthly maintenance requirement where you take a little bit of oil or something
that they've included and you wipe it down with that scrubby pad.
Enough jibber jabber, though. I want to play. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
You need your shoe covers first. And while you figure those out, let's talk about the headset because it's not B-Y-O.
The Pico 4E is the enterprise version of the Pico 4 from BiteDance, yes, that BiteDance.
It's not the newest version of this headset that would go to the 4Ultra, so this is more
of a Quest 2 competitor, which is to say, it's still a great headset.
It comes with a Snapdragon XR2 SoC, 8GB of RAM with 256GB of storage.
Each eye gets a crisp 2160x2160 resolution, resulting in a 105-degree field of view that
refreshes it up to 90Hz and looks great on the pancake lenses.
The headset also features a full-color 16-megapixel pass-through camera as well as eye and face
tracking cameras, something you won't find in the non-enterprise version.
It comes with two controllers that can be summarized as copying Meta's homework, and
it comes in at 899 bucks, which is pretty expensive compared to the 400-ish Pico 4.
We say 400-ish because you can't get the Pico 4 direct in North America because of TikTok
vs. USA type problems. So why did the company go with the enterprise version?
Well, because they can put their own custom OS on this one, and that might be related
as well to those TikTok problems that we talked about earlier.
But here's a quick summary of what that means for you. It means that everything works very smoothly with the treadmill, but the OS and more importantly,
the games library are limited. So it's going to come down to how good that game library is.
Well, I've got my shoes figured out. I settled on the medium size, and it's pretty intuitive.
It just straps on a little something like that, straps over the top, a little something
like that, and this is cool. You actually got this little flippy thing on the bottom, so you can have your grip and
also your slip. Oh, and at the top, there's these little clips for the foot trackers.
Appropriately the tutorial is called First Steps. Okay, he's unlocked, boys.
Oh, let's go, buddy. Hey, look, there's another one.
This is exactly the kind of home that I would imagine somebody having the space for one
of these stuff.
I am not walking. Let's just reboot it because there's some wonkiness sometimes with their software.
Okay. Dude, I'm sweating. We have a tail.
Yeah, and another shirt. LTTstore.com.
Okay, now it's working.
Let's go. Oh, okay.
And if you try running, you will go faster. No, this way.
There we go. Let's go. Can I just play a game now?
Is this co-op? Yeah, so a lot of the games that come with the Omni are what Virtuex would put in their
Omni Arena, their arcade game stuff, so this would be like, oh, you'd have four of your
friends and you'd go to the arcade and you'd all play this game together.
Sick. You can play online, though the install base isn't very big right now.
I cannot not make the leaderboard here.
There's four players on the leaderboard. One of which is Virtuex Dev Cam 1.
All right, let's go, boys.
See you would think when you step, you know, that you move that direction, but the direction
is actually determined by the ARM. Oh, hello.
All right, let's go. Whoa, hi there. Whoa, hey.
Oh, hey. Boom, boom. Get out of here.
Get out of here. Go on. Go on.
Get out of here. Get, go on. Go on.
Get. You've got to escape the toxic area. No, I can get out of the toxic, get out of the toxic area, dang it.
Bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop.
Okay, save zone. Here we go. Here we go.
I am freaking sweating, brother. Whoa.
Okay. Oh, you okay? Oh, yeah.
It's a flawed solution to a problem with no perfect solution, you know what I mean?
Okay, I fell off at once already, which is not the best endorsement.
Where the heck is the rest of my, oh my God.
Geez. He throws stuff at you.
This is ridiculous. Oh boy.
Come on. Come on. Come on.
Bring it on. Juggernaut. Whoa.
Come on. Go back. The responsiveness definitely leaves a little bit to be desired.
Okay, extraction zone.
I survived. I noticed this is not the world's best headset.
I actually got a little bit of nausea just walking around using pasta in it before, but
as soon as I got into that zombie experience before, I forgot about the nausea.
All right. What am I trying now? Hyperblast.
You're playing hyperblast, baby. Gauntlet of champions. You need to set a time because we're going to have staff members try and beat it.
Whoa. He's going bronze. What do you mean bronze?
Boop-boop. Boop-boop-boop. This is freaking hard.
Check point. Here we go. Silver.
Oh God. Okay. Oh man.
Oh my God. Whoo. 9,300 points.
New high score. Let's go. You're 31st in the world.
Yeah. You're only 21 behind circumference.
Okay. One more try. One more try.
Yeah. Here we go. I got this.
Off to a good start. Come on. Get over here.
Boy. No, I'm fine. Looking pretty good.
Going for gold. Come on. Where you at?
Check point. Boom. Silver.
Okay. 13,000 points. Okay.
13,000 points. Check point. Boom.
Silver. Okay. 13,000 points.
Yo. Is that enough to beat circumference? Oh.
Dang it. He's beating you by a thousand.
If there's one thing you can expect from Linus, it's getting too into a game.
Too competitive. I'm tempted to do another run, but when I say run, I mean it kind of literally, this
thing's freaking tiring. Yeah. Let's talk about that.
It's more difficult to walk on the Omni for three reasons. You're always placing your foot up on the lip.
You're always walking uphill. And in real life, when you're walking around, you're basically just falling forward and
catching yourself. And you use that momentum from one step to the next.
You don't have any momentum on this thing because you're not actually moving.
And the other part is that there's friction. There's a lot less effort required to move your foot through the air compared to dragging
it on a surface, even if they do come with those slippy shoes.
So you end up getting really tired just doing the basic activity.
I just want to try something. This base is only 150 pounds.
Can you like eat hard enough that it's going to tip? How stable is it?
Just try jumping off in a direction.
I'd say you'd have to have a pretty strong intent to accidentally remove yourself from
this thing. You know? Yeah.
Good to know. I just want to check that because we're going to get a bunch of different staff to try it out.
Oh, cool. He's a tall boy. And I wanted to see, what do you mean?
I think you were like 90th percent tile in height. How tall are you, Maria?
I'm 55 centimeters. Do the math.
Yeah. Editor. Yeah, I'm a little nervous.
I am 70 pounds over what this should hold.
Yeah, this tag is rated to support 250 pounds, Alex.
Which means I am 320 pounds. Well, for those math fans out there, technically it's out of spec, but you're over spec'd for
this machine. It's the issue. How much experience do you have with VR?
I own a Quest 3. You own a Quest 3? Do you use it a lot?
No, I'm a fair amount. Okay, cool. What kind of games do you play?
Fun games. I own a VR at home. Okay.
My first Quest. I had the CV one.
Oh, wow. And then it ended there. Oh, my God.
Okay. This feels so normal. Oh, my God.
Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God.
Oh, my God. Oh, my God. This is so difficult.
That didn't feel good at all.
I feel a lot of pressure, like, from the thing, like, that pulls me backwards.
You're going to try and run through a level as fast as you can.
We're going to do the first level. You're doing great.
I feel like it. Honestly, the tiny steps seem to be making you a faster than the bigger steps.
Go, go, go. Okay. You're doing great.
Oh, my God. Yeah. The pulling towards the side.
It's so difficult. Oh, my God. 8,400 points.
Is that good? No. 8,000?
No, I forgot that. Yeah, you did it. Oh, my God.
No. You did not get the best score. Of course.
You could try again if you want. I feel if I go again, I will throw up.
Reality's so much better. There. Go.
Yeah. Okay. How did somebody get so many points?
So what are your impressions? How did that feel? My feet hurt.
I don't know why. The experience was very difficult for me because of the pulling.
Yeah. And those tiny steps are, you know, like, I'm already, I'm obviously out of shape, but
this is really awkward. It looks very, you know, so it feels like I'm going to fall forward.
It didn't seem like it was struggling at all with me with some of the, like your size.
So like, that's great to see. Do you want to know how much it costs? I want to know.
Yes. $2,600. U.S.
You get the base and you get a VR headset plus the controllers.
That's a lot, but compared to a treadmill or like a peloton, that's comparable.
Yeah. That's an exercise machine that's actually kind of sick.
Yeah. Like I would buy this over a treadmill. Would I buy it?
No. But you probably wouldn't buy one.
No. Would I spend the money on it? Probably not.
Thanks for coming out and trying it. Yeah. This is actually kind of fun.
Now that a few staff have tried it, we kind of see that even though they technically
support short people all the way down to four foot four, Maria had like a lot of issues
with being dragged back by the ARM, even in the lightest support setting.
And that means that if you're close to the margins of who this supports, then maybe this
isn't exactly for you, which is honestly a good question in its own right.
Who is this for? Hardcore VR enthusiasts?
Sure. But I doubt that many would want to pay for the bundled headset and again, you can't bring
your own. While I understand that the company is interested in making this easy to use, I bet your VR
enthusiasts wouldn't mind tinkering. The company plans on offering SteamVR support, but at this point, it's unclear how well
that will work and how much support we'll see from developers for this device specifically.
And even then, the headset you do get is held back by the custom OS, making the upside of
the VR headset included comment a little bit less compelling.
And it's kind of big. Sure, the size trade-off comes with the peace of mind of knowing that you're not going
to run into any furniture. And if you want to run, well, this treadmill is the only option.
And also an apt name, because I think the strongest argument for this is as a fitness
machine. There are lots of people who will spend thousands on equipment that they only use maybe a handful
of hours a week. And if your biggest obstacle to improving your health at home is a lack of fun, well,
this could be a great solution. Did your normal treadmill come with the VR headset?
I didn't think so. It probably didn't even come with a segue to our sponsor.
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Thanks for watching. If you guys liked this video, why not check out our original video from 11 years ago to
see how it's progressed.