Turris VR Seating and Movement Control and DIY PC Kickstarter Kicks Off

The Praevidi team just launched its first Kickstarter, a VR seating and movement controller that houses a Mini-ITX . The design allows the user to input movement controls with their body while keeping their hands free. The seat also has infinite rotation and with the PC in the seat that means that you won’t be tangling yourself in wires.

The Turris Kickstarter has Turris kits for as low as $475 with an estimated January 2016 delivery date. The video on the Kickstarter page does a great job explaining the concept behind the Turris.

The guys behind the Turris are industry vets and have done design and consulting work for plenty of VR companies like Seebright, Virtuix, AboutFace, and Sixense. The design is really a great concept for keeping untangled in the current wired VR gear, and having another movement input is icing on the cake. The seat has been made to be tuneable for individuals since we are not all the same.

Having known both Simon and Aaron for a few years I took some time to ask them about the Turris.

Simon said “Aaron has been working on seating for 20 years and we began collaborating first on extreme overclocking and then on virtual reality. Together we conceived of the Turris as a systems approach to the ergonomic and motion control challenges of VR. This is a complex piece of hardware that solves many problems at once. And it’s the best excuse to build a VR rig.”

I also spoke with Aaron about the Turris and asked what the biggest engineering challenge was. He said it was finding where the pivots would be for the proper motion of the seat, and that process lead to a tunable design. He also said that one of the biggest challenges going forward is cost reduction to help them bring down the cost of units, making them more affordable to consumers.

The Turris will be American made and will use parts from the US, with a small amount of electronics coming from overseas.