Jan Goetgeluk talks about creating Virtuix Omni Treadmill, and how he didn’t want to have just a sit-down experience within virtual reality. He talks about participating in the Meant to be Seen forums before the Oculus Rift came about, and how he wanted did a lot of trial and error to solve the problem of locomotion in VR.
He talks about some of the keys to his successful Kickstarter campaign, and what types of games work the best with the Virtuix Omni. He talks about motion sickness, and his favorite VR experience within the game that Virtuix developed called TRAVR. Finally, he talks about future plans after raising a round of $3 million, and his thoughts on the future of VR
Reddit discussion here.
TOPICS
- 0:00 – Intro – Virtuix Omni Treadmill
- 0:26 – No moving parts, low-friction surface and shoes
- 0:51 – Stabilizing the feet w/ different coefficients
- 1:15 – Integrated tracking solution with capacitive sensors
- 1:40 – How did the Omni come about?
- 2:04 – Had you been involved with VR. Being VR enthusiast on MTBS
- 2:20 – What was the turning point that you had to create the Omni?
- 2:51 – Key to your successful Kickstarter campaign? 5 months of marketing beforehand and having thousands of people ready to contribute.
- 3:17 – Where did you market to? MTBS forums.
- 3:47 – Are you a player of first-person shooters?
- 3:58 – Which games work the best with Omni?
- 4:32 – Dealing with motion sickness?
- 5:36 – Designed for a sit-down experience and not have 360-degree tracking. Not a surprise. Need to first nail the seated experience. He personally does not want to sit down. Provide full VR experience. In real life, we walk around. Walking increases immersion. Rotating body increases immersion. Putting on foot in front of the other increases immersion. Standing and walking provides a bigger sense of presence than sitting down.
- 7:01 – Favorite VR experience – in the game that they’re developing called TRAVR.
- 7:27 – How do you optimize a game for the Omni – Speed and pace is important
- 8:01 – Limited field of view causing a higher walking speed – Need find right pace
- 8:45 – After raising money, and what will you do with that. Broaden distribution.
- 9:19 – Where you see VR going?
Theme music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. My name is Jan Gudgeluk. I'm the developer of the Omni and CEO of Virtuix. The Omni is the first ever virtual reality treadmill, if you will, that allows you to walk, run, and jump in 360 degrees. And it puts your mind and your body into the video game.
[00:00:26.756] Jan Goetgeluk: And when you say treadmill, maybe you could sort of explain like how there's no moving parts. So how do you have a treadmill with no moving parts?
[00:00:33.135] Kent Bye: That's right. The basic element is a low friction surface on which the user walks with low friction shoes. So in essence, you put your foot forward and your foot automatically slides back to the center. So it's a low friction system, if you will. But at the same time, your feet are stabilized. You're not sliding left or right. The objective is to mimic a natural gait.
[00:00:52.009] Jan Goetgeluk: I see. And so how are you stabilizing the feet on this device then?
[00:00:56.201] Kent Bye: Yeah, so the configuration of the shoe sole is somewhat intricate. There's different friction pads with different coefficients of friction. For example, there's more friction on the toe, so that when you go from your heel strike to the toe strike, your foot slows down. And so there's a lot of trial and error, a lot of research went into that, but the result is what you see in our demo videos.
[00:01:15.409] Jan Goetgeluk: I see. And so you started off initially with doing, like, Kinect tracking, and I'm just curious about how you're correlating the actual movements to a virtual space.
[00:01:24.396] Kent Bye: Yeah, right. So now we have our integrated tracking solution based on capacitive sensors. And in essence, the Omni is a big touchpad. At any given time, we know the position of both your feet. And our software translates your feet positions and your feet motions into input that drives the game. I see.
[00:01:41.674] Jan Goetgeluk: And so how did this come about?
[00:01:43.436] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, a lot of work, hard work. I've been working on this for the last three years. I started on this way before there was an Oculus Rift, way before virtual reality was cool again. Even though I thought it would be cool again, I had a hunch that virtual reality was going to make a big comeback. And so I wanted to solve this problem of locomotion. How do you physically walk around in the virtual world? And that's what I started working on.
[00:02:05.234] Jan Goetgeluk: I see. And so how have you been involved in virtual reality?
[00:02:08.376] Kent Bye: I was very much a virtual reality enthusiast, I was part of the forum, same forum as Paul Merlucki was part of, so I was very much in tune with the community and with the evolvements in virtual reality, yeah.
[00:02:19.742] Jan Goetgeluk: I see, and so what was the moment when you decided to kind of take this on? What was the turning point where you really saw that this was going to be, you had the hunch that this was, you know, had something there?
[00:02:30.498] Kent Bye: Yeah, there was not really an aha moment or D moment and I think that's rarely the case. I just started working on it little by little and initially there was a lot of trial and error, a lot of error and just trying again and trying other things. And so it took a while to get to a state where I thought, wow, this is starting to look really good. But it took time and effort to get there. I see.
[00:02:51.732] Jan Goetgeluk: And so maybe you could talk a bit about the process of doing a Kickstarter and how were you able to be so successful with your Kickstarter campaign?
[00:02:59.603] Kent Bye: The key to a successful Kickstarter campaign is all the work you do up front. We did five months of marketing up front, reaching out to the community, building a following, making sure that as soon as you launch that campaign, that you have thousands of people ready to back you or ready to support you. And all of that needs to be built up before you kick it off.
[00:03:17.852] Jan Goetgeluk: I see. And so maybe you could sort of go through the timeline in terms of when Oculus came out and then who were you marketing to when you launched your campaign?
[00:03:26.166] Kent Bye: Well, I started from the ground up. I started where everything has begun. I was actually on the Meant to be Seen Forum. That's where Paul Merlucki was active. That's where the Oculus Rift came to be. That's where the Omni came to be. That's where I was active and asking people for input and advice. And that was the initial community, if you will, where everything started.
[00:03:45.558] Jan Goetgeluk: And are you personally a player of first-person shooters?
[00:03:48.819] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, I used to. Now I'm so busy working that I only play for work purposes, which is still a lot of fun. But yeah, I like first-person shooters a lot.
[00:03:57.540] Jan Goetgeluk: Yeah, because it seems like this system is, initially at least, really geared towards first-person shooters. At least a lot of the demos that I've seen end up being a lot of first-person shooters and have a lot of views, so I'm assuming that it's really resonating with people.
[00:04:12.127] Kent Bye: Virtual reality works best with games that are from a first-person perspective. So naturally, first-person shooters, there's quite a few out there that can be demonstrated. But it also works well with Skyrim, for example, or even with Minecraft, for example. We had a great Minecraft demo. Any game that has a first-person perspective works really well.
[00:04:32.569] Jan Goetgeluk: And so anytime there's movement in virtual reality that's not matched to the body, it has the potential for motion sickness. And so I'm just curious about, does the motions of your body, kind of making the motions of like you're walking, does that help reduce motion sickness that you found?
[00:04:47.520] Kent Bye: It does. So motion sickness has a lot of causes, some of which have not to do with motion. But it seems to be that indeed the Omni does help with one cause of motion sickness. That is where, you know, I got sick, for example, using the Rift while I moved forward pushing the button with my thumb. And so my brain thought I was walking forward, but my body was not doing anything. And so that was confusing for my brain. At least with the Omni, when you walk forward, you're actually physically making that movement on the Omni, and that does help.
[00:05:15.816] Jan Goetgeluk: I see. But have you still seen some people having issues with motion sickness when they're kind of running around these first-person shooters?
[00:05:23.107] Kent Bye: Yeah, sure, because there's, again, a DK1, low resolution, a little bit higher latency than the DK2. There's a lot of factors that play into motion sickness, and the DK1 did not solve all these issues just at first bet.
[00:05:36.076] Jan Goetgeluk: And so with the CV1, the initial release of the consumer version of the Oculus Rift and the DK2, Oculus VR has come out and said this is really designed for a sit-down experience. And so I'm curious about, you know, when you heard that news, what your reaction was in terms of how that's going to play out in terms of the camera being there and not necessarily being tracked 360 degrees.
[00:05:59.673] Kent Bye: Yeah, it was not a surprise to me actually since the beginning. Oculus needed to go for the seated experience first for legal reasons and now also I understand the importance of first nailing the seated experience and making sure that works really well before complicating it further. That said, I personally did not want to just sit down and push buttons on a gamepad or a keyboard. And other people also don't want to just sit down. And some people do, and that's fine too. But with the Omni, we want to provide that full virtual reality experience that, look, in real life, we're walking around. And walking around in virtual reality increases the immersion. We talk a lot about presence, about that feeling of immersion. Well, guess what? Standing up. increases the feeling of immersion. Rotating naturally with your body increases the immersion. Then putting one foot in front of the other and actually walking, and your brain thinks you're walking. It fully immerses you. It provides a feeling of presence, much more so than when you're sitting down on a chair. And that's personally what I'm passionate about. I see.
[00:07:02.028] Jan Goetgeluk: So what has been one of your most favorite VR experiences by going in and either using Omni or not?
[00:07:08.717] Kent Bye: Yeah, it's actually our own demo game, Trevor, which we showed at GDC for the first time. It was actually my best VR experience. It's a game that is optimized for VR and optimized for the Omni as well, and it's very immersive. It's suspense, it's a great game, great assets, great art, but also just a great VR experience, and I'm very excited about that one.
[00:07:28.230] Jan Goetgeluk: So how does one VR developer optimize for the Omni? What are some of the things that you did in your game in order to make it better than, say, a non-optimized game?
[00:07:36.444] Kent Bye: Speed is very important. Virtual reality, the speed needs to match more real life speeds. You don't want to be walking around at 30 miles per hour. So speed is important, pace is very important. And Oculus did a great job in bringing out this handbook of how to create and optimize games for virtual reality. Game design is very important for a good virtual reality experience. And so you need to follow some of these guidelines.
[00:08:00.113] Jan Goetgeluk: I see, and so when I was talking to Eric Hodgson, he was saying that the field of view not being a full 180 degrees, he found that could be one potential reason why locomotion sometimes needs to be accelerated in VR in order to feel like you're walking at a natural speed. Have you found that there's more of a one-to-one pacing in terms of using the Omni and how fast you're moving, or do you have to do some sort of acceleration in terms of what is a natural walking speed?
[00:08:26.815] Kent Bye: Not really. Yeah, I don't see any need to accelerate or slow down. It's about having the right pace in a game and your brain adjusts. It's like when you're walking on a conveyor belt at the airport, you know, on a flat escalator. I mean, suddenly you go very fast. Your brain doesn't even really notice that all that much. I don't think that's too crucial.
[00:08:45.065] Jan Goetgeluk: I see. And so you got Kickstarted and then you got a round of funding, around $3 million. Maybe you could talk about what next with what that's going to enable you to do.
[00:08:54.540] Kent Bye: Yeah, so right now our main focus is to get our product out of the door. We need to ship our product, get it to our backers and to the community. That's our number one focus. What our additional funds now allow us to do is also broaden our distribution and reach more markets and also gear up for, you know, virtual reality is coming to be a mass market new medium and we need to be ready for that as well and we will be.
[00:09:16.933] Jan Goetgeluk: Great. And finally, being here at the SDD conference here, where do you see this whole field of virtuality going?
[00:09:25.188] Kent Bye: It's very exciting to be here. The organizers, Carl and Bruce and SVVR, they pulled off an amazing conference that I think is bigger than anyone ever thought it would be. Everybody's here. The whole ecosystem is here. The whole community is here. And next year, we'll most likely need a bigger venue. This is going to grow and grow and grow. And virtual reality is alive and kicking. And it's here to stay this time. It's really exciting to see the new technologies that are coming out. And I think it's a great time to be in virtual reality. OK, great. Well, thank you. Thank you.
