Omni

[toblix]

Remember the ridiculous VR stand you discussed as a kid with your nerd friends? Well here it is. It was fully backed in almost an instant, it seems like, and the idea is ridiculous and crazy, and they have the Words With Friends guy there to rave about it.

 

I don't know. What a crazy thing that does has a slight chance of becoming something completely awesome.

[Murdoc]

We're soon going to be living in 1980's version of the future with this stuff and it'll be super rad.

[Ucantalas]

I look at it, and all I can see is the virtual reality living room from "Doug's 1st Movie".

...this is where I would put a picture or video clip to illustrate the part of the movie I mean, but it seems to be something the Internet forgot.

[Ben X]

My thoughts from the Size Five forums:

 

Although the special shoes you have to wear sounds a bit strange, the Omni is still ace. In the unboxing video on their Kickstarter page they mention Valve having a demo running where the gun position is tracked so you can run away and shoot over your shoulder behind you as you leg it!

It seems like it's designed to be pretty sturdy, so assuming it could stand up to regular exercise sessions, it'd be amazing to have software with courses set up on the Rift that have you running through spectacular environments (eg Green Hill theme), maybe add gaming elements to it where you have to reach up and grab stuff occasionally so you can hold weights while doing it.

 

Thinking about it, even playing through a firefight where you're running back and forth and jumping around a lot a few times because you keep dying seems like it would be exhausting! I guess they must have considered this...

I notice they don't show jumping very much because it looks silly. Needs an auto ceiling-harness so when you're playing Mirrors Edge and you jump long distances it lifts you off the ground.

 

 

My dream game with all the VR turned up to 11 would be a LOST game. The Island would be a fantastic location for a game, with loads of interesting locations and history plus the potential for more stuff to show up at any time (a non-proprietary replacement could be done instead obviously, but I LOVE LOST). Running around with the Omni, mixed with Milo-style Kinect puzzle cleverness would be amazing, brushing sand off old surfaces, copying down hieroglyphs and showing them to other people. I was always disappointed that Milo got canned and then there was never a replacement killer app for Kinect. The Double Fine games are the only ones I'm aware of that really did anything with it.

[Twig]

This plus the Occulus Rift (which they are already using) plus that weird suit with body-wide force feedback?

 

Goddamn gaming is weird. The future is yesterday. Welcome to tomorrow.

[Squid Division]

For someone with a fairly long stride, that thing looks unusable. Also, what happens when the little nub in the stupid shoe hits one of the grooves instead of going in it?

[SecretAsianMan]

I'm just gonna go ahead and repost this

[Ben X]

[SecretAsianMan]

Yeah, I failed pretty hard the first time.  Fixed it.

[Twig]

I'm kinda already sold on this...

 

Which is not something I expected to say. I wonder if it'll work for people as tall as me. Basically, what Squid said.

[Sententia]

holy shit that's a crazy thing!

 

Talking mechanically we've never had precise movement of the player character in games before.  The mouse can translate actions perfectly but can't be used for movement really.  We've got analog sticks, arcade sticks, WASD, I guess the closest I can think of to perfectly translated movement is a flight stick, but that's really only useful for games with 3D movement.  The Omni might open up a whole new field of depth and skill for First and Third person games, like the mouse does for shooters.  I can imagine a fencing game maybe, or a proper tennis game.

 

This is assuming it gets supported, seems to me unlike the Oculus where you can apply some visual tweaks to already existing graphics, to support the increased articulation of the Omni a game would have to have its entire movement system be created with the expectation of allowing that.

[TheLastBaron]

I remember seeing basically this same thing on G4TTV like 10 years ago back when they had shows like Arena with pros playing Unreal on tv and in one episode they had everyone play some game using basically this, and I thought wow that's crazy, but things like this will never be a real thing outside of some crazy expensive unit that only exists on Tech TV.  

 

Edit:  I found it, the game was America's Army

 

http://archives.starbulletin.com/2003/10/21/business/index2.html

[elmuerte]

All these VR things only give a weirder disconnect between the games and reality. Just imagine doing a running jump on the Omni, or a double jump for that matter. This does solve the problem with the OcculusRift w.r.t. to turning your body towards the direction you're looking at.

 

 

It's cool nonetheless.

[tegan]

I look at it, and all I can see is the virtual reality living room from "Doug's 1st Movie".

...this is where I would put a picture or video clip to illustrate the part of the movie I mean, but it seems to be something the Internet forgot.

 

 

 

 

I personally sat through like a third of the movie to take that screencap, thank you very much.

[SecretAsianMan]

 

 

I personally sat through like a third of the movie to take that screencap, thank you very much.

 

That's some dedication Tegan.  I love the juxtaposition of the future VR technology we're only now starting to realize, and the huge CRT monitor behind them.

[I_smell]

Mr Dink was truly a man ahead of his own time.

[Ben X]

WHEN ARE WE GOING TO GET PINK BENDY DRAWERS?