We are delighted to announce that we have started pilot production of the Omni! Our first production units are currently being assembled, and at least one early unit will be delivered to our first Pathfinder participant in the next two weeks. See a few pictures and a video below of various Omni parts in production:

We plan to ship our 50 Pathfinder units in January and ramp up our production shortly thereafter. To manage expectations: ramping up our production and delivering our backlog of more than 4,000 Omnis will take several months. We realize the wait is getting unbearable, and we too are anxious to get Omnis to all of you. However, we need to take our time to ramp up production cautiously so that we can guarantee the quality of each Omni we ship. We will communicate a precise production and delivery schedule as soon as available. Thank you for your patience and continued support!

Speech: The Importance of Locomotion for Active VR

Thanks again to everyone who came by our booth at the recent ATX VR meetup. Virtuix is excited to show both the Omni and TRAVR to the VR community one last time before our production launch. Our CEO Jan Goetgeluk took the opportunity to talk to the crowd about the importance of locomotion for Active VR. See his talk below:

Omni / Vive and Fallout 4

Our content team continues to push the boundaries of freedom of movement in VR with the integration of the Omni with the Vive head mounted display and Lighthouse controllers. We’ve found that the immersive effect of combining these technologies is quite incredible, and revolutionizes the way levels can be designed and played. For a technical background on the Omni + Vive integration, see a forum post here by Patrick, our game programmer responsible for the integration.

In case you missed our earlier demo, check out our video here of TRAVR: Training Ops played with the Vive and Lighthouse controllers. We’d also like to thank Ben Lang of Road To VR for an excellent article about this Active VR experience.

In addition to our content designed specifically for VR and the Omni, we were also keen to test out the newly released Fallout 4 and see how well this worked in VR with the Omni. While the game is not designed for VR and a third-party driver is required to port the game to the Rift, the setup requires little hassle, and Lorenzo had an absolute blast crossing the wasteland.

Open world games like Fallout show the power and enjoyment of locomotion and Active VR, even in games not designed for VR. Just wandering through the environments and marveling at the world is greatly entertaining, and you’re burning a ton of calories while doing so!

Launch Meetup

For those of you who can make the trip, we’d like to invite you to the first of our launch events at the Virtuix headquarters in Austin, TX on Thursday, December 17^th starting at 7pm. If you would like to try out the Omni and crack open some Mountain Dews with the team, visit our Eventbrite page here and reserve your place:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/virtuix-omni-get-together-tickets-19786828938

VR Industry Developments

• Live streaming platform NextVR raised a $30.5 million Series A round from investors including Formation 8 and Comcast Ventures.

• Experiential entertainment company Two Bit Circus raised $6.5 million in Series A funding to build the circus of the future.

• VR startup WakingApp raised $4.3 million to build an accessible VR/AR content creation platform.

• Samsung’s Gear VR started shipping with rave reviews and sold out at Best Buy stores in just a few days.

• Taiwanese PC manufacturer Asus has announced it is building an augmented reality headset to be released in 2016.

• The NY Times’ Google Cardboard experience “The Displaced” was distributed to one million subscribers and elicited overwhelmingly positive reactions from first-time VR users.

Community, we hope you are liking our increased frequency of updates. After a long development phase, events are accelerating rapidly now. We are only weeks away from delivering our first Omni. This is an exciting time for all of us, and we’re grateful to share this journey with you.

As always please join us on our Forums if you’d like to discuss this update or anything VR related: http://forum.virtuix.com

Best regards,

Jan and the Virtuix Team