As free promotion for hardware startups go, one would be hard pressed to point to something better than a $175 million Spielberg film.
“It was actually Warner Bros. that had reached out to us to get two Omnis for use in the movie,” Virtuix founder and CEO Jan Goetgeluk tells TechCrunch. “We shipped them two, and they were used as the model for the CGI in the movie.”
An omnidirectional treadmill features prominently in Ready Player One’s real-world segments — though the design is a notable departure from Virtuix’s Omni offering, owing in part to the fact that the film is set more than 20 years in the future. The fictional depiction of virtual reality and adjacent technologies are intentionally forward-looking.
Virtuix’s product is less mechanical that Spielberg’s take, which more closely resembles a standard treadmill. It instead relies on a concave design and slip-on shoe covers, using the effect of foot slipping to simu...
