You have a point Kevin, but the fact is that Aston Martin, and the like, did not set their company up as if they would be selling Ford's, they entered as a premium sports car manufacturer and priced their business and product accordingly. We knew that Virtuix did everything to make the system as "cost-effective" as they could, and still they failed to hit the best production saturation numbers.
kevink808 said:
Guys, Teslas and Aston Martins, etc., don't have mainstream appeal. But there's a market for them among the affluent. Virtuix Omni sold 20,000 units and had to shut down pre-orders until they ramp up their supply chain and distribution channels as a small start-up. When VR is mainstream, there will be a marketplace for premium hardware as well.
For many of the omni-directional crowd, the inability to receive long-term support from the consumer HMD manufacturers has crippled business beyond supporting the kickstarters. If it were not for the secondary business of commercial entertainment the majority would have hit the wall. When it was dropped on them that CV1 was a recommended "seated" experience the heart went out of much of their investment - to have that dropped on you after months of supportive activities came across as... unprofessional!
I am not sure if these companies can wait 5-10 years for when "VR is mainstream" - and the question will have to be, even by then will these kinds of peripheral to simulate movement in the virtual space still be a practice consideration with inside out tracking?
https://vrawards.aixr.org/
"The Out-of-Home Immersive Entertainment Frontier: Expanding Interactive Boundaries in Leisure Facilities"
Wow, we seem to have gone full circle, I remember posting here back in 2014 only for a number of the late lamented posters making it clear that their expert opinion was there was, and would never be, any interest or business sence in VR arcades, and that if the sector existed (and they doubted) it was a niche of no importance!
Cyril said:
...it's just that for now it makes more sense to focus on Arcades, one of the reasons being stated is that it turns out there's a cumbersome maintenance cost associated with current treadmills.
How times have changed. I saw that less and less attacks to any mention of Digital Out-of-Home Entertainment (DOE) on the forum recently, suppose that the reality dawned... or they got board!
Not really sure about the maintenance cost comment - the operation of the systems in DOE actually generates higher issues, so the reverse is true. The systems just seemed to have priced them out of contention when Prosumers have to drop roughly $1,500 for a robust VR rig to start with.
Ah, the NES Power Glove... was at one of the launches of that during the day. No one treated it seriously then, now it is a collectors item.
kevink808 said:
...Because I don't want to wait 5-10 years for some delicious FPS locomotion!
I don't think you need to worry about a suitable omni-direction peripheral being on the market for when VR moves to consumer mainstream. My gutt feeling is that once we in DOE sector have ironed out the kinks on best delivery of experience, a consumer unit will emerge that achieves the important points and then be in the stores for VR's fifth phase of adoption!
I just wonder if these approaches will be the way the final systems is presented or if there is a new technology waiting in the wings that could make this approach redundant?
