A 'Made for Meta' VR Treadmill Just Launched at $2,595. I Want to Believe.

I have been gaming in VR since the original Oculus DK1 shipped to backers in 2013. Across thirteen years, one promise has hovered over this entire medium like a ghost we cannot quite catch: you should be able to walk in VR. Not teleport. Not push a stick forward and pretend. Actually walk. Run. Crouch behind cover. Sidestep an incoming swing. Every single year of that thirteen-year stretch, somebody has told me a treadmill was about to make it real. And every single year, it has not.

So when Virtuix put out a press release last week announcing the Omni One for Quest, the first VR treadmill ever to earn Meta's "Made for Meta" certification, my reaction was complicated. The happy part of my brain shouted: finally, this is the moment. The realistic part of my brain looked at the price tag, which is $2,595, and went quiet. Both reactions are correct. Let me explain.

What just shipped

Virtuix officially launched Omni One for Quest on June 23, with units shipping now through the company's website and authorized dealers. It is the consumer version of a 360-degree treadmill the company has been refining for over a decade. You stand in a low-friction concave bowl, wear special shoes that slide on the surface, and physically run, walk, crouch, and strafe through games while a rigid harness holds you safely upright. The headset is your Quest 2 or Quest 3, and it connects natively without the PC tethering and middleware hacks earlier versions of the rig required.

The Made for Meta part is genuinely a milestone. It is the first VR treadmill to clear that certification, which means the games on the supported list talk to the rig directly rather than spoofing controller inputs. The launch library is small but pointed: VAIL, Forefront, The Boys: Trigger Warning, Star Trek: Infection, TMNT: Empire City, Men in Black: Most Wanted, Exoshock, and Zero Caliber 2. A few of those titles I have already written about this year. TMNT and Forefront in particular feel built for this exact use case, fast multiplayer arenas where being able to actually sprint and dodge would not just be a novelty, it would be a tactical advantage.

The $2,595 elephant

Here is the part I cannot dance around. $2,595 is five Quest 3s. It is more than four Pro models. It is in the same neighborhood as the Apple Vision Pro, which is a sentence I never thought I would type about a treadmill. For roughly the price of a small used car or a high-end gaming PC, you get the rig, the headset support, and a handful of bundled games.

I want to be fair about who this is for. The honest answer is not "a casual VR gamer." It is the same person who buys a Bigscreen Beyond and an enthusiast sim-racing wheel rig, the player who treats their setup like a hobby rather than a purchase. For that player, the math is at least defensible. You have a dedicated VR space already, you have a Quest, you are looking for the one upgrade that genuinely changes what the medium feels like. A treadmill does that. Nothing else does.

But "defensible for enthusiasts" is not the same as "ready for the rest of us." A device that costs more than the headset and the gaming PC combined is not going to be the thing that fixes VR locomotion at scale. It is going to be the thing the YouTube reviewers try out, and the rest of us wishlist.

Why it still matters

So why am I writing about it at all if the price filters out almost everyone reading this? Because the Made for Meta certification is not really about this device. It is about whether the platform itself is finally willing to take physical movement peripherals seriously.

For most of VR's history, Meta has had a near-total lock on the entry point of the medium and an equally clear bias toward selling whatever can ship in a single box. Treadmills, haptic vests, separate controllers, body trackers, those all sit outside the box, which has historically meant they sit outside the official Meta plan too. When Meta certifies a peripheral as Made for Meta, it is saying, in essence, this is allowed to be part of the Quest ecosystem on equal terms. That is the door that has been closed for ten years, and Virtuix is the first one to walk through it.

I do not think the Omni One is going to sell a million units. I do not think it has to. What it has to do is prove to the next ten companies, the ones currently sitting on prototypes of cheaper, simpler, more living-room-friendly designs, that the certification path exists and that Meta will actually let it work. Two years from now, somebody is going to ship a $499 treadmill that is less ambitious but a hundred times more accessible, and they are going to do it because Virtuix and Meta cleared the runway in June 2026.

What it actually feels like to play

I should be honest about something else. I have not personally spent time on the new Quest version of the Omni One because, like most of you, I am not about to drop $2,595 on a pre-release impulse. But I have used the previous generation in a demo space, and I have read enough hands-on coverage of the new model to know what to expect.

It is glorious for about an hour. Genuinely. The first time you sprint in a VR game and the world keeps pace with your actual stride, your brain reorganizes around the experience. You stop "playing VR" and start being in VR in a way that flat-stick locomotion never quite delivers. Multiplayer shooters in particular transform. Dodging around a corner becomes a real thing your body does. Cardio kicks in. You sweat. After thirteen years of pretending to walk in virtual worlds, the moment your legs catch up with your eyes is one of the few experiences in this medium that genuinely cannot be faked.

The honest other half is that not every game benefits, and some actively get worse. Slow-paced titles feel awkward when you have to commit to walking. Anything with seated mechanics is pointless on a treadmill. And the learning curve of the rig itself is real, both physically and in the games' calibration. This is not a plug-and-play accessory that quietly improves every game in your library. It is a specialized tool that makes a specific subset of games dramatically better, and the rest a wash.

The verdict from someone who is not buying one

So here is where I land. The Omni One for Quest at $2,595 is not for me, and it is not for almost any reader of this site. I would be lying if I told you otherwise. But it is one of the more important things to happen in VR peripherals this year because it puts the first real flag in the ground for what Made for Meta certification can include. The treadmill is not the headset of the future. It is the proof that VR is finally allowed to be more than one piece of glass strapped to your face.

I am going to keep my $2,595, thanks. I am going to keep watching the next generation of treadmills inch toward a saner price, the one where this conversation actually opens up to normal players. And when somebody finally hits that number with a Made for Meta sticker on the box, I will be the first person back here writing about why it changed the medium. Until then, the dream is alive, the certification path is open, and the headset on my face is still going to teleport me from one piece of cover to the next. For now.