LAS VEGAS—The Virtuix Omni hopes to do for the feet what the Oculus Rift did for the eyes: bring immersive virtual reality within reach of users.

The Omni is a 360-degree treadmill that lets users walk and run in virtual reality while staying safely in place. Like the Rift, the Omni was originally crowdfunded, received a great deal of attention over the last few years, and is finally heading to early backers later this year. I got a chance to try it at CES 2015.

The Omni is best described by the phrase, "Did you ever see that one scene in Hackers?" It's a body cage with a large, shallow bowl of "walking" space, surrounded and supported by arms that form a waist-high ring around the user. Slip-on shoes equipped with sensors skate on the bowl's surface while a harness keeps the user centered and upright.

The demo took me through a shooting gallery with the Oculus Rift, challenging me to run through corridors and shoot targets with a gun-shaped controller. The version of the Omni I used was a pre-production model, and only had the forward-walking function integrated into the demo, but the final version that will ship to users will allow for movement in any direction.

Walking on the Omni feels awkward at first, because of the almost complete lack of friction between the shoes and the floor. I eventually got used to a relatively comfortable walking pace, but first I had to run like I was being chased by a monster in Scooby Doo, wheeling my legs seemingly ineffectually in place while bongos played in my head.

This is where the cumbersome harness came in. It kept me centered on the waist-high ring of the Omni, preventing me from flying forward or backward as I moved. It did its job, and I eventually found just the right sort of lean to move quickly with my feet without looking like I was flailing in an inner tube. The sense of skating on a waxed floor in my socks didn't go away, but despite the slippery movement I ran forward with reliable control in the demo.

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The sensors occasionally flew from my feet (again, because it was a pre-production model and I was running like Shaggy), so I couldn't compare my score in the demo to others, but those minutes of shooting definitely felt like something I could get used to. I doubt whether physically running through levels in first-person shooters is feasible, since characters in those games are inhumanly fast and possess impossible stamina, but virtually walking through a fantasy landscape or exploring a museum definitely seems within reach.

The Virtuix Omni is available for pre-order at $499, but will increase to $799 when it starts shipping.

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