By Tiernan Ray | JANUARY 08, 2016
On Thursday at the Consumer Electronics Show at the Las Vegas Convention Center, I met with privately held Virtuix, a startup in virtual reality that has a novel twist.
Founder Jan Goetgeluk, born in Belgium, had spent a year traveling up and down Silicon Valley in a van with a prototype of his product, called “Omni,” trying to score venture funding.
His efforts bore fruit in early 2014 when he got the first of what would end up being $8 million in funding from a prestigious collection of individuals and institutions, including Mark Cuban and Sprout Ventures.
The Omni, which went on sale about a month ago, has already brought in 5,000 orders for Virtuix. This is happening at the same time that Facebook’s (FB) Oculus unit just put its “Rift” VR headset on sale this week, formally kicking off the consumer era of VR.