Omnideck

Omnideck
Basic Info
Type	Input Device
Subtype	Locomotion
Creator	Omnifinity
Developer	Omnifinity
Manufacturer	Omnifinity
Release Date	2011
Price	EUR 55,000 base floor price (Omnideck 6, 2014)
Website	https://omnifinity.se/
Versions	Omnideck 4, Omnideck 5 (current models); Omnideck 6 (launched 2014)
Requires	A VR system with positional tracking, such as the HTC Vive
Tracking
Tracking	Uses the positional tracking of the connected VR system
Connectivity
Power	3-phase 400V 16A 50Hz (Omnideck 4 and Omnideck 5)
Device
Weight	1500 kg (Omnideck 4); 1800 kg (Omnideck 5)
Size	Omnideck 4: 4.2 m footprint diameter, about 3.8 m active diameter, 0.2 m high; Omnideck 5: 5.0 m footprint diameter, 0.2 m high

The Omnideck is an omnidirectional treadmill Input Device developed by MSE Omnifinity in Sweden. It allows unrestrained and unrestricted motion inside virtual reality environments. The treadmill is a circular platform made of 16 wedge-shaped, motorized sections of rollers that move the user back toward the center while they walk, jog or crouch, so the user can travel any distance in a virtual world while staying inside a fixed physical area.

The company that makes it has been owned by the Swedish defence and simulation group W5 Solutions since 2021 and is now named W5 Omnifinity AB, based in Växjö. The Omnideck was first designed as a training simulator for ground military personnel. Most installations the company has announced since 2017 are at university and research laboratories, and one has been at an entertainment venue.

Reviewed 27 September 2026. Checked all new history, specification, software, installation and DLR study claims against the cited Omnifinity, W5, press, university, DLR, thesis and GitHub sources. About review dates.

History

Origins and The Gadget Show

Omnifinity was set up as a subsidiary of MSE Engineering AB, a Swedish company that supplied training and simulation equipment to the defence industry. According to a 2016 degree project carried out with the company, MSE had built an aircraft simulation system and saw no comparable system for soldiers on foot, so it began developing the Omnideck as a simulator for ground personnel training in situations such as raids and rescue operations. The first Omnideck was used with a projection dome rather than a headset.

First shown to the public in 2011, it was featured as the "Ultimate Battlefield 3 simulator" in the UK show called The Gadget Show, where the user was surrounded by a 360 degree projection screen while playing Battlefield 3. The episode aired on Channel 5 on 24 October 2011. Engadget reported that the rig was built around an omnidirectional treadmill designed by the Swedish company MSE Weibull, together with a 360-degree video dome from Igloo Vision measuring 4 meters high by 9 meters wide, ten infrared cameras that tracked the player, a modified Kinect camera for jumping and crouching, and 12 paintball markers that fired at the player when they were shot in the game. The show put the cost of the build at £500,000. Omnifinity's sales manager Richard Guilfoyle later described this as the first public showing of the Omnideck prototype.

Omnideck 6 and head-mounted displays

In November 2014 Omnifinity announced the Omnideck 6, which Hexus and Techaeris described as a 6 meter wide motorized omnidirectional treadmill. Techaeris reported that the platform used 16 motorized triangular sections of rollers fanning out from a stationary center, that it could track movement at up to 4.5 mph, and that it worked either with a projection display or with an Oculus Rift headset. Hexus reported that the system combined optical tracking with the Oculus Rift DK2, that Omnifinity pitched it at military infantry training, and that the company's FAQ gave a base floor price of €55,000. The 2016 degree project notes that interest from the gaming industry grew once the treadmill was paired with the Oculus Rift, and that headsets allowed the company to drop the projection dome.

In 2014 it was demonstrated at I/ITSEC in Orlando, Florida, US where it was equipped with a Oculus Rift DK2 HMD that was tracked using the OptiTrack motion capture system. The show ran from 1 to 5 December 2014. Shephard reported that the Omnideck 6 had been in development for two years before this first showing at I/ITSEC. Guilfoyle told the publication that it had drawn a lot of interest from potential customers, although no systems had been bought at that point.

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On 4 February 2015 Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Löfven visited Omnifinity's business development office in Växjö. The company said it had been part of a government-backed incubator program since January 2013. At ITEC 2015 in Prague, Omnifinity and Close Air Solutions showed a networked joint terminal attack controller (JTAC) training scenario. An F-35 flight simulator, a joint forward observer, a JTAC and a dismounted soldier each worked in their own virtual world, with the Omnideck 6 used for the infantry role.

Modular redesign

The original platform took a long time to install at a customer site. Each of its 16 sections held 48 individually mounted rollers driven by a belt unit, and all 16 belt units were linked by shafts and turned by a single motor. In 2016 two engineering students at Linnaeus University in Växjö produced a conceptual redesign of the platform for Omnifinity as a set of pre-assembled modules, with roller placement and friction adjustment moved to pre-assembly so the modules align themselves during installation. They estimated that this would cut the installation time to about 6% of the original. The current Omnideck models use 16 sections that are each driven by their own motor.

W5 Solutions ownership

W5 Solutions AB acquired 100 percent of MSE Omnifinity AB, with the transaction completed on 1 June 2021; the terms were not disclosed. W5 said Omnifinity would operate as an independent division serving customers in innovation, simulation and entertainment. W5 Solutions supplies training and simulation, mission systems, communication and power equipment to government agencies and companies in defence and civil protection. Its year-end report for 2025, published in February 2026, lists W5 Omnifinity AB as one of the group's seven wholly owned subsidiaries.

On 8 February 2022 W5 announced the first North American entertainment sale of the Omnideck, to Aaru Entertainment LLC of Tulsa, Oklahoma, which combined a VR arcade, a café and bar, and game development and planned to open in the second quarter of 2022 with custom and licensed content.

Now it uses the HTC Vive as its primary VR System.

Design and hardware

The Omnideck platform is divided into 16 wedge-shaped modules that together form a 360-degree walking surface of aluminium rollers. Each section is driven by its own motor, and the system communicates using EtherCAT. A delivery includes a power control module, a wired safety system, an external switch box and a handheld control panel, and Omnifinity's team handles installation and operator training. The company says the Omnideck is manufactured in Sweden.

The treadmill does not track the user itself. Omnifinity says it takes positional tracking data from the connected VR system, naming the HTC Vive "(or any other) VR system". The software reads where the user stands relative to the center and drives the rollers to carry them back. In a 2025 study, researchers at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) described a static platform 0.5 m across at the center, where users start walking, and a "progressive" speed setting in the Omnitrack software under which the rollers spin exponentially faster as the user moves toward the edge.

Omnifinity currently lists two sizes:

Model	Footprint diameter	Active diameter	Height	Weight	Power supply
Omnideck 4	4.2 m (13.8 ft)	About 3.8 m (12.6 ft)	0.2 m (8 in)	1500 kg (3300 lbs)	3-phase 400V 16A 50Hz
Omnideck 5	5.0 m (16.4 ft)	Not stated	0.2 m (8 in)	1800 kg (4000 lbs)	3-phase 400V 16A 50Hz

Installations can differ from these figures. The DLR laboratory page gives a diameter of 4.7 m for its Omnideck, while the 2025 DLR study describes the treadmill as having a scalable diameter and gives the walking area there as 3.7 m wide. The University of Stuttgart's unit has a diameter of 5 meters.

Software

Omnifinity supplies the Omnitrack software suite to monitor and manage the treadmill, along with the Omnitrack API, integrations for Unity and Unreal Engine, and an Omnideck OpenVR treadmill device driver. Its public code repositories include a Unity package built on the Unity XR Interaction Toolkit and Unity's OpenXR implementation, which adds an Omnideck continuous-move provider to the toolkit. Its documentation lists tests with Omnitrack 2.6.11, SteamVR and Vive Business Streaming, and gives setup steps for HTC Vive controllers.

An older Unity API for the HTC Vive is now marked as deprecated. In that version Omnitrack sends the user's position on the treadmill to the game, where it is converted into a velocity vector in meters per second and passed to Unity's Character Controller. The documentation warns that the calibrated Vive playspace and the game's camera rig must keep the same orientation. The company also publishes an Unreal Engine 4 Omnitrack API and a fork of Google's Tilt Brush with Omnideck support.

Installations and applications

Omnifinity has announced installations at several research institutions and one entertainment venue. The table lists those confirmed by the company or the institution.

Announced	Site	Location	Reported use
September 2017	Centre for Immersive Visual Technologies (CIVIT), Tampere University of Technology	Tampere, Finland	Research facility for emerging visual technologies, alongside VR and AR displays, light field cameras and motion tracking
February 2019	IMC University of Applied Sciences Krems (eVRyLab)	Krems, Austria	Exploring data and models produced in the lab, including the Scan2VR scanning project; demonstrated with an HTC Vive Pro and a wireless module
March 2019	Robotics Innovation Center, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI)	Bremen, Germany	Remote control of construction equipment by a user wearing an exoskeleton with force feedback; placed between 180-degree stereoscopic projection screens and usable with a headset or the screens
October 2021	Institute of Transportation Systems, German Aerospace Center (DLR), MoSAIC laboratory	Braunschweig, Germany	Pedestrian simulator linked with a bicycle simulator and car driving simulators to study how road users behave and interact; full-body tracking with Xsens MVN Link
February 2022	Aaru Entertainment LLC	Tulsa, Oklahoma, United States	VR arcade with custom and licensed content
September 2023	HELIX, University of Leeds	Leeds, United Kingdom	Research, education and creative projects in fields from engineering and architecture to healthcare and digital arts
May 2024	Immersive Computing Lab, Human-Centered Computing Labs, Graz University of Technology	Graz, Austria	Remote sensing research in which users steer a robot in an unexplored or dangerous area by walking on the moving floor
June 2024	SimTech Immersion Lab, Institute for Visualization and Interactive Systems, University of Stuttgart	Stuttgart, Germany	Studies on fitness and sports data monitoring and on haptics linked to the treadmill; funded by the SimTech Cluster of Excellence

Research

The DLR installation has been used for published pedestrian research. In a study in Transportation Research Part F (2025), 36 participants approached a two-lane road on the Omnideck while wearing an HTC Vive Pro Eye and decided whether to cross ahead of oncoming cars. In the first seconds after noticing a car, how often a pedestrian turned their head predicted the crossing decision better than walking speed; closer to the kerb, walking speed became the better predictor.

The authors also reported limits of the treadmill. While approaching the road, participants walked at an average of 0.95 m/s, slower than the 1.2 to 1.6 m/s typically observed for crossing pedestrians in real traffic. Stopping took about twice as long as in real traffic because the treadmill carries a user who stops back toward the center. Speeds above 2.0 m/s were physically impossible on their configuration. Participants wore a safety harness attached to the ceiling, and the study excluded people with a body mass over 120 kg as a device limitation.

See also

• Omnidirectional treadmill
• Infinadeck
• Virtuix Omni
• Cyberith Virtualizer
• KAT Walk C 2
• Walking-in-place
• Redirected walking