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. 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. After 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 & Busters instead. But now they are back with a revamped version for end users dubbed the Omni One. It's 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 him 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 our sponsor, War Thunder. War Thunder is a free-to-play, detail-packed vehicle combat game with 2,000 highly detailed aircraft, helicopters, tanks, warships, and more. Jump in for free at the link in the description to snag a special bonus pack and get 20% off at checkout with code [Music] lt20. I got to 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

one 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, the harness thing. The arm is height adjustable from 4'4 to 6'4, and the bull can handle up to 250 lb, 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 three. This affects how much it supports you versus how much it gives you free movement. As for how it holds you up, the

Omni One 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. Oh right, and while you figure those out, let's talk about the headset because it's not BYO. The Pico 4E is the Enterprise.

version of the Pico 4 from ByteDance. Yes, that ByteDance. It's not the newest version of this headset; that would go to the 4 Ultra. 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, 8 GB of RAM, and 256 GB of storage. Each eye gets a crisp 2160 x 2160 resolution, resulting in a 105° field of view that refreshes at up to 90 Hz and looks great on the pancake lenses. The headset also features a full-color 16-megapixel passthrough 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 400ish Pico 4. We say 400ish because you can't get the Pico 4 direct in North America because of TikTok versus 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 Tik Tok 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. They 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. Ah, appropriately, the tutorial is called First Steps. Okay, he's unlocked, boys. 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 to have. I am not walking. Let's just reboot it because uh there's some wonkiness sometimes with their software. Okay dude I'm sweating. We have a tail yeah and and another shirt LTT store.com. Okay now it's working. Let's go woo. Okay and if you try running you will go faster. No this way here 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 virtuix would put in their Omni Arena their like 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 um 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 virtuix Dev cam one. 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 you got to escape the toxic area, get out of the toxic, get out of the toxic area, dang it. Okay, safe 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? Like I fell off at once already, which is not the best endorsement. What's my, where the heck is the rest of my, oh my God, jeez, he throw stuff at you, this is ridiculous. But I think, 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. 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 p through 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? Hyper Blast. You're playing Hyper Blast. Hyper Blast Gauntlet of Champions. You need to set a time 'cause we're going to have staff members try and beat it. Woo, he's going bronze. What do you mean bronze? B, this is freaking hard. Checkpoint, here we go, silver. Oh God, okay, oh man, oh my God, 9,300 points, new high score, let's go. You're 31st in the world. You're only 21 behind circumference. Okay, one more try, one more try, 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? Checkpoint, boom, silver. God, 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 lus, 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. Since 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 'cause 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. Oh, before you take it off, I just want to try something. This base is only 150 lb. Yeah, can you like Yeet hard enough that it's going to tip? Like how stable is it? Like just try like jumping off in a

direction. I'd say you'd have to have a pretty strong intent. Yeah, you accidentally remove yourself from this thing, you know, like 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, yeah. Reys, he's a tall boy, and I wanted to see what do you mean. I think you were like 90th percentile in height. How tall are you, Maria? Why 55 CM? Do the math. Yeah, Ed. Yeah, I'm a little nervous. I am 70 lbs over what this should hold. Yeah, this Tech is rated to support 250 lbs. Alex's own, which means I am 320 lb. Well, um, for those math fans out there, technically it's out of spec, but uh, you're over speced for this machine is the issue. How much experience do you have with VR? I own a quest 3. You own a quest. Do you use it a lot or fair amount? Okay, cool. What kind of games do you play? Fun games. I own a br at home, meta.

Quest um 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. 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 faster than the bigger steps. Go go go. Okay. You're doing great. Yeah. They're pulling towards the side. It's so difficult. Oh my God. 8,400 points. Is that good? No. 13,000. Yeah. I forget that. Yeah. You did it. Oh my God. No. You did not get the best score. Of course. Sorry. You could try again if you want. I feel if I go again I will throw up. Reality is 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, I'm tired. Those tiny steps are, you know, like I'm already, I'm obviously out of shape, but this is really awkward. It looks very, and also it feels like I'm going to fall forward. It didn't seem like it was struggling at all with me, with some of 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 US. You get the base, and you get a VR headset, plus the controllers. That's a lot, but compared to a treadmill, I feel, or like a pellet, that's, it's like comparable. Yeah, yeah. As an exercise machine, it'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 44, 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. And 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 Normie treadmill come with a VR headset? I didn't think so. It probably didn't even come with a segue to our sponsor War Thunder. Ever dreamt of being a pilot behind the controls of all kinds of war machines? Well, now you can. From Sea to Sky, War Thunder lets you take the wheel of over 2,000 realistic tanks, planes, and warships. It's a free-to-play PVP game that is all about epic

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I thought this product was DOOMED 10 years ago

Linus Tech Tips is a passionate team of "professionally curious" experts in consumer technology and video production who aim to educate and entertain.
