I’ve been on the hunt for ways to make gaming on my Meta Quest 3 more immersive. The Roto VR Explorer is unmatched in terms of having that seated experience, but when it comes to walking in the virtual world, the answer is usually a VR treadmill.
These are fun and all, but they do come with steep costs and take up a lot of room in any home. That’s where the Freeaim VR shoes come in — yep, those oversized Birkenstock-looking sandals on my feet allow me to walk in place and control my in-game character’s movement.
So when I saw the Freeaim shoes, I had two questions to answer: will I eat it in embarrassing fashion the second I put them on? And do they really contribute to a different level of VR immersion? Let’s get into them.
Like Bambi on ice at first
Freeaim VR shoes were specific to business and enterprise customers for the first couple of years, but at Augmented World Expo (AWE) this week, the company has announced a consumer pair that I got to try.
Essentially, these are mini treadmills on your feet — electrified rollers move beneath your feet at a certain speed depending on the pace you walk or run. At first, it’s such a weird experience to get used to. You’re trying to walk forward and feeling the inertia while not actually moving at all.
In some ways, it first feels like you’re slipping on a wet surface and trying to regain your balance. But my advice would be the same as I gave people trying the Onewheel — put your trust in it to balance you and act normal.
Once I stopped trying to balance myself against the motors and focus on walking like a normal human being, everything felt normal. So for the sake of the health release form I’d just signed, I strapped myself into the harness for protection and got to playing.
Oh, and the connected smartphone app gives you additional controls to really fine-tune the experience to what you’re comfortable with. And there’s even a machine learning algorithm coming to them that will understand your walking pattern and foot angularity to provide better balance!
Making moves
Before you knew it, I was off to the races in Steam VR games (Meta and PlayStation VR game support is in development). First, I jumped into a hiking VR experience that dropped me into the serene surroundings of a small stream overlooking a mountain.
Slowly strutting my way through here helped demonstrate the real immersive capabilities of the Freeaim shoes — a nice gentle cardio that shows VR fitness in its best light. Walking my way through this area really made me feel like I was truly hiking in a new faraway land to the LA streets I currently walk around.
Turning is a little clunkier than real-life, as it doesn’t necessarily work with the same micro-movements you may make — rather you need to look and make deliberate steps in another direction for it to work.
But then it was time to put Freeaim’s shoes through a real challenge of a zombie shooter horde mode. This requires not just fast movement, but movement in multiple directions to dodge the oncoming undead. And I was definitely surprised to see just how easy it was to juke zombies and walk fast around the map to dodge.
I didn’t survive long, but that comes down to my terrible aim and not the shoes. Freeaim is onto something special here.
Outlook
Realistically, at £850-900 for the launch offer (roughly $1,200), these are still quite a costly investment that’s reserved strictly for the VR enthusiasts with deep pockets.
But with your average decent VR treadmill going for $2,000, this could not only save serious players quite a bit of money, it could save a lot of space, too. No need for some giant surface taking up the living room floor — you can just wear shoes and move in place instead.
Freeaim’s VR shoes do take a bit of getting used to, but once you get the hang of it, they’re a lot of fun and really add to the immersion of any game.
