Current situation with clumsy VR hardware and quite unpolished VR content is somewhat improving. Big money is being thrown on the table and the whole movement is being propelled forward. However, the goal of seamless experience is far away and only the strongest will endure until the finishing line. Virtuix is a relatively small company that came into the limelight several years ago, raising over a million dollars on Kickstarter. Virtuix is addressing one of the key obstacles for the immersion into the VR: Freedom of movement inside virtual presence. Motion sickness, room-scale space constraints and unnatural navigation schemes like teleportation that inherently break immersion and spoil the
VR Hardware Startup Virtuix Offered $32 million in Public Series A Funding
If you are a hardware startup, your life is very difficult. First, getting funding from traditional sources (Venture Capital, banks) is borderline impossible, as there’s always ‘an app for this and that’ that promises the world. Yet, we’ve seen sizable ‘wins’ with hardware startups which took the public route and seek out funding on crowdfunding websites such as Indiegogo or Kickstarter. Perhaps the best known publicly funded startup is Oculus, who gathered $2.44 million on Kickstarter. As we all know by now, the company was acquired by Facebook in a $2 billion, all-cash transaction. But, Oculus is far from being the only one. Several years ago, we attended
Virtuix Ships Its First Omni Platform
Virtuix Inc. said on Wednesday that it has delivered its first Omni platform to an individual who backed the Kickstarter campaign on its first day. That means production is finally in full swing after the project first launched back in June 2013. The Virtuix Omni is built for virtual reality gaming. It consists of a concave platform and a support ring that attaches to the base to keep you in position. The base features grooves that special Omni shoes slide into. The platform doesn’t move, thus you’re essentially walking in place and stepping forward at the same time. I took the Virtuix Omni for a
Look Back: Virtual Reality gets Real at E3 2015
Just a couple of weeks ago, the Electronic Entertainment Expo was hosted in the beautiful city of Los Angeles, and will be held once more on June 14-16, 2016. This annual event, which is better known to followers simply as ‘E3’, is always a hive of activity and usually offers some fascinating insights into the real-time gaming world. This years’ offering was no exception, with game hardware and the rise of virtual reality (VR) technology firmly under the spotlight. While there may have been a strong focus on VR technology at the event, however, there was a strong suggestion that some of the most intriguing