Team Fortress 2 Played on an Omni-Directional Treadmill with Oculus Rift VR

Post by Dan @ 10:39am 22/04/13 | 14 Comments

The creators of the Virtuix Omni, an omni-direction treadmill being designed for endless running in virtual reality simulations has released a video demonstration of the device being used to play a game of Team Fortress 2 (from Roadtovr, thanks Eurogamer):

CEO of Virtuix, Jan Goetgeluk, told me about the TF2 experience that, “The action feels like real running. The immersion is intense. I had a former Marine try HL2 yesterday, and he was slightly shaking.”

At the moment the Virtuix Omni is using Kinect for tracking, but Goetgeluk say that the company is working on an integrated tracking solution that will be part of the Omni.

Actual running speed is not yet tied to in-game speed, according to Geotgeluk, but that will come in due time.

The naturally slower turning and response speed obviously doesn't make it an ideal setup for conventional games designed for rapidly moving keyboard and mouse players, but it's a good proof of concept for what could be possible in a game custom-designed for treadmill movement.

Virtuix reportedly intends to launch a Kickstarter pledge drive of their own in the near future to fund wider manufacturing of the device.

virtuix omni oculus rift kinect trailer

Latest Comments

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Tremble
Posted 10:59am 22/4/13

If you relax your eyes and let them go cross-eyed, you can get some of the 3D effect on that video.

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thermite
Posted 11:02am 22/4/13

Demos as soldier, never does a rocket jump, what an a******

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deadlyf
Posted 11:04am 22/4/13

That was about as annoying as watching a video filmed in portrait.

Also the guy seemed really bad, I haven't played TF2 in awhile but isn't the point of invincibility that you don't have to hide behind cover?

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Toxus
Posted 11:13am 22/4/13

These things are so stupidly pointless

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thermite
Posted 11:18am 22/4/13

Walks into a room facing forward.... walks to center of room.... looks around... sees 3 enemies... THEN starts firing rockets.

I'd be out of rockets before I even passed through the doorway.

This contraption seems like a massive hindrance, or the guy is just useless. Would you buy the Ginsu knife if the guy demonstrating it took 5 minutes to slice a carrot?

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trog
Posted 11:20am 22/4/13

That is AWESOME. Think of the exercise you'd get!

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ThunderBunny
Posted 11:40am 22/4/13

mixing excercise with gaming is absolutely absurd. i play games to avoid excercise

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Tollaz0r!
Posted 11:53am 22/4/13

Combining gaming and exercise is the way forward for gyms ;)

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eski
Posted 11:56am 22/4/13

Combining gaming and exercise is the way forward for gyms ;)

+1

They could have treadmill only servers.

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Eorl
Posted 12:10pm 22/4/13

As Dan said in the OP, it was probably not the best choice of game to show off when TF2 requires a lot of twitch movement. What it does do though is show a really interesting proof of concept, and with a game like Mirror's Edge or even Antichamber it could be quite surreal. I love this kind of technology though, really hope it becomes more prominent and hopefully at a reasonable price range.

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Dazhel
Posted 12:19pm 22/4/13

If he was playing Pyro he'd only need a regular treadmill, not an omni-directional one.

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ravn0s
Posted 12:35pm 22/4/13

the treadmill has potential, but it wouldn't be any good for twitch based games. maybe a game like skyrim?

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tel
Posted 02:38pm 22/4/13

This isn't the final product, so hopefully will improve. Using this with the VR headset and kinect will be totally awesome.

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