[MainFragger]

I have mentioned this in passing, and kind of trashed it in other forums, but I wanted to give a more comprehensive explanation of my experience with this device...

If you are interested in seeing an article about it (easier than spending half my review describing the unit): Omimo Uranus One - Tech Specs, Features, & Price

I ordered the Omimo on ebay, and it took about a month to get here from China. Once it arrived, I unpackaged it. It came with a 5 page manual that is printed on copy paper. Its just basic set up information, and nothing else.

The unit comes with a joystick control that looks more like a garage clicker.. I was never able to get the control or headset to acknowledge each other and work together.

Initially they tell you to charge it for about 4-6 hours, but after that, it generally takes about 2 hours to fully charge.

I started the unit up, and to be honest, I think the OS/Apps were not installed properly. The unit had a basic screen it came to with about 4 apps, 2 of which were games. One was a simulator. It starts out with a head tracking pointer and you can look where ever you want to go to an app or menu function, and then press the "ok" button on the side of the goggles.

The first app I went into was a game. I never really got it working right, and the pointer disables when you go into that program. I had to find a sub menu and put it back on for that game session. Why? Because there is no way to save that setting and tell it that you ALWAYS want to use the head tracking pointer in it. At first I thought that was a mistake of that game designer, but once I went into other games, I found out that it worked that way there too.

The game looked great, but without the controller, handling was a bit rough.. and I decided that until I got the controller sync'd, that game wasn't going to work well. That is the first nail in its coffin.

I then went into the Roller Coaster simulator. Really cool idea and really cool looking from a 3D perspective (although the graphics do look dated). But I did like being able to be on a moving coaster and be able to look wherever I want. Two issues..this game you can look around, but the head tracking pointer doesn't work at all..you can't even find an option to change that setting. The other is, the designer must have decided that that game was so good you'd never want to play anything else..because there is no exit or quit. The only way I was able to get out of simulator was to reboot the googles.

The main attraction of this unit is that it is relatively light, and wireless. You can walk around your room with it. You never feel a cable tugging on you or risk stepping on its cable..(mostly..I'll get back to the cable issue in a few moments..) Its like having cardboard, but there is no need to slide a phone in and out of it..its all one unit. It took me a few attempts to connect wirelessly, but eventually I got it. BUT there was no google play app or store app of any kind. There was no browser of any kind. So, how do I get an app on here? Shrug, the support for it is non-existant.. So that was its second nail in the coffin.

The third and final nail came when I decided to hook up either my PC or my Blu-Ray player to the HDMI connection on the controller. 1. Back to using a HDMI cable again..not the end of the world, but not really what I was hoping for. 2. No matter how small you set the settings or whatever you tried, external video feeds would stretch past the edges of the very blurry lens edges. I didn't notice in VR apps, so much, but in anything else, those lenses felt like Cracker Jack toys. You could use to head tracking and pointer to navigate Windows..and as long as your apps and controls were center screen centric, it worked very well. But once you opened a window, even if it was not fully maximized, the edges and corners of the window were unseeable. You could sometimes estimate where the "X" is to close a window, but it was really half skill half/luck to be able do so..

I used it for a few days, and there were some cool things that I was able to watch on it on Blu-Ray, either on my Laptop or from my player. And I was even able to play a little xbox360 on it, but again, with blurred edges, real play was nearly impossible.

In the end, I threw in the towel. It just wasn't working for me. I contacted the company. They tried to give me $60 and asked me to keep it. IF I wasn't already plan on getting a Rift or Vive or a better version of the Omimo, I might have accepted that. But I knew I need to reinvest the $300 it cost me for that unit, so I insisted they take it back. They got it back a month later, and three months after that, they finally broke down and refunded my money. Which, coincided with the release of the Vive..which I now have.

(edited in later) I almost forgot to mention something. When I tried to set this up for 3D viewing, there is a slider bar to adjust the views in both eyes to get 3D to line up right for you. But they make the dialog box that the slider is in so big, you can't actually see what you are trying to adjust behind the box. Rendering it pointless.

This technology was poorly developed and utilized and pretty much unusable for me. I have heard this company may have gone bankrupt since then. If that is so, I think either Rift or Vive would be smart to buy them out for their wireless tech and HDMI interface.. (I'd suggest a wireless HDMI option, if its possible.) The truth is. if the controller had worked, the apps were set up right, and the lenses were better.. This unit would have actually been superior to either the Rift or Vive. Had this company done this right and charged a little more to be able to get it right, I think right now people would be asking "Whats a Vive?", "Whats a Rift?" and the answer would be, "Its a useless wired device similar to an Omimo"...

[krisguy]

Sounds like the old cash grab. Why do people think that they can make this stuff so cheap to just take people's money?

[MainFragger]

I honestly feel like my unit was broken and not set up right. The lenses and 3D setup screen still would have been a deal breaker for me.. but I have a feeling that if the OS had been installed properly, and the controller worked, I would have probably ended up holding on to it long enough that I wouldn't have been able to return it.

The thing that this unit makes me wish for is SteamVR creating an app of some kind that allows the HDMI connection on the Vive to be able to work right off of a Blu-Ray player or Xbox360.