The growing popularity around virtual reality created a hardware boom for gaming. Now that our eyes are being plugged into these virtual experiences, how can we bring the rest of us—our hands, our bodies, and our feet? 3DRudder is a solution for the latter.
Essentially, this weird balancing board takes first-person controls out of your hands and puts it at your feet's disposal. On display at CES, I watched interested tech blogger after interested tech blogger awkwardly balance their way through a rudimentary 3D world, and for some reason, it really wasn't that weird.
Once I got my feet on this thing, the movement was surprisingly intuitive. 3DRudder only has four separate functions, swaying left and right lets you strafe and pushing one foot forward and one foot down moves the camera north and south. You can also twist your feet for a kind of Matrix-y 360-degree spin-o-rama and tilting forward or backward give you zoom powers.
As weird as that all sounds, it's really not. It felt similar to acclimating to a few first-person shooter. Yeah, you'll accidentally kill yourself at first, but it's not long until you're a pro.
The 3DRudder is currently on Indiegogo and will begin shipping units in May. The early bird price is $110 and will shoot up to $130 after the first 250 units are sold.
Feet...it's the future, man.
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