Cybershoes for Quest review: a new way of walking in VR

I have been able to try the Cybershoes, the special shoes that let you walk in VR while you are seated! There is now an ongoing Kickstarter campaign that proposes a special version of them that works with the Oculus Quest (1 and 2) and I’m sure many of you are wondering if they are good or not. Well, I am here to answer exactly this question, so fasten your seatbelt and prepare yourself for one of my usual detailed reviews!

Cybershoes Unboxing

The Cybershoes company has been very kind in sending me a pair of shoes to let me write this review. But when I received it, I noticed that the package was too big and really too heavy for just two shoes… how was it possible?

Well, I solved the mistery unboxing the parcel: the company hasn’t sent me just the shoes, but the whole gaming station, that is:

• The Cybershoes
• All the connectors to charge them and to connect them to PC and Quest
• The Cyberchair, a rotating stool where you can sit down to play in VR with the Cybershoes
• The Cybercarpet, a 1.5m x 1.5m carpet that you can put below the chair so that to play on it. The carpet is made in a material that is rough enough to let the wheels of the Cybershoes rotate well while being also a bit slippery so that the shoes move on it without problems. It is the ideal material to be used with the Cybershoes.

I was moved by so much generosity and I was very happy to be able to try the full experience of the Cybershoes!

Gaming Station Setup

Setting up the whole gaming station required me some time. The procedure was pretty easy, but I had to:

• Put the carpet on the floor and flatten it;
• Assemble the chair;
• Charge the batteries of the shoes;
• Put the receiver for the Oculus Quest on my Quest 2;
• Pair the receiver to the shoes (via Bluetooth);
• Pair the receiver with the Oculus Quest. This was the trickiest part because I needed 2-3 reboots before my Quest detected the Bluetooth device of the receiver;
• Fit the shoes to my feet;
• Go on the chair, put my Quest on, and play!

All of this required me around 2 hours while filming everything for the Youtube video. If you are not a Youtuber, I think that 20-30 minutes are enough for everything. The process of setting the Cybershoes up is pretty straightforward, the only big nuisance to me was the Bluetooth pairing. If you get stuck there like me, just keep rebooting the Quest 2 until it sees the Cybershoes in the Bluetooth settings, and be careful that they may appear in the list even after 1 minute or such, so be patient.

Here in the below video, I show you the installation process that I followed to configure everything, hoping that it can be useful for you to set up your Cybershoes!

Cybershoes – Video Review

I made a video with my impressions on the Cybershoes gaming station for Quest! You can enjoy it here below

… or you can go on for the usual written article 🙂

Design

I like a lot the design of the Cybershoes Gaming Station. The shoes per se are pretty basic, and they remind me of those sandals that you use to go on the beach during the summer, just a bit thicker. But the carpet, and especially the chair are very elegant, and the combination of black and red colors gives them also that gamer-feeling that makes me love them even more. The chair is the part that I like more because It has an elegant curved design that makes sure that it fits well in every house: it doesn’t seem a nerd gadget, but an elegant stool: it is super approved.

How does it work

The Cybershoes are meant to make you walk while you are seated. What you have to do is first of all configure all the system with the procedure that I explained above: after all the setup, the data from the shoes will be sent via Bluetooth to the Quest that will read them as if they arrived from a gamepad. This means that every Quest game that supports a gamepad can work with the Cybershoes.

When the system is ready, you can sit down on the rotating Cyberchair, then wear the shoes and tighten them to your feet. You can wear the Cybershoes with and without your shoes on: personally, I prefer to remove the shoes and wear them on my socks so that they remain cleaner, but the company actually advises to wear them with the shoes so you have a better grip.

Once you are sit down this way, you can take your headset and put it on your head. When you play a game that supports the Cybershoes, you can move in the game by just walking on the floor while staying seated. The movement that you have to perform is exactly the one of walking, by making your feet oscillating and gently touch the carpet.

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The movement of the feet rubbing on the floor will make a little wheel that is installed on the sole of the Cybershoes to rotate. This rotational movement will be detected by a sensor that will send the info to the receiver installed on the Quest. This receiver will send the information via Bluetooth to the Quest runtime as if it was data coming from a gamepad. This means that if you make the movement of walking forward, it will be interpreted as a gamepad whose thumbstick is tilted to make you walk forward.

Using the button on the receiver, you can calibrate the rotation of the head and the shoes, so that in the game the rotation of the head does not determine the direction of movement, that is instead is decided solely by the feet. You can also regulate the speed of walking (the sensitivity of the walking movement detection) by using a little lever on the receiver.

Comfort

The Cybershoes system is pretty comfortable, but it could be better.

The shoes can be tightened or loosened in many different ways (there is the standard fitting mechanism, plus there is also a screw that can be moved in different holes to make the overall fit of the shoes more tight or loose), so it can accommodate all kinds of feet. When you wear the shoes, there is always the dilemma about if making them a bit tight or a bit loose, and both choices have the usual pros and cons. In the end, whatever you choose, it will feel good, and some minutes into the game you will forget about having the Cybershoes on your feet.

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The chair is pretty comfortable, but I found myself sliding a bit forward while being on it. Furthermore, finding the right height at which to set it so that you can be comfortable and at the same time perform the walking movement in an efficient way is not immediate, and also here you will have to make some tests and find the best trade-off for you.

When you start using the Cybershoes system you will most probably find it pretty comfortable, but what may annoy you is what happens in the long run. Walking with Cybershoes requires physical effort: you have to keep walking and keep rotating the chair, and this is far more tiresome than using the thumbsticks on your controllers to move/teleport in the game. This is made even worse by the fact that you have to perform a walking movement that makes sure that the wheel installed on the soles rotates. Sometimes the movement detection doesn’t get detected well, so you’ll have to walk faster and more energetically than you hoped in the beginning, and so you end up making a lot of effort just to walk. I solved the second problem by moving the lever on the receiver so that the walking movement gets detected at maximum speed, so that I can have a more relaxed walking and still run in the games. But if you use the Cybershoes, you have to keep in mind that you’ll make an effort to walk.

Motion sickness

The company claims that Cybershoes make you walk in VR without having any kind of motion sickness, and I can confirm that it is true. Since you perform a physical walking movement and you virtually move in the game, your brain thinks that everything makes sense and you don’t feel dizzy. People very sensitive to motion sickness should be careful though: since the movement of the shoes is not mapped with the same intended speed into the virtual game and since the detection is not perfect (sometimes a step is not detected or a step forward is detected as a backward one), the locomotion can stutter and it can give discomfort to very sensible users.

Compatible games

Cybershoes for Quest are compatible with all games that support Gamepad locomotion. For now, there are a few applications that have also implemented official support (like Arizona Sunshine, and TWD: Saints and Sinners), and for sure more will come out when the product will go on the market after the Kickstarter campaign. Some applications are compatible, but they have some issues: for instance, in VRChat, I had to calibrate the shoes rotated by 90°, otherwise, I always walked perpendicularly from the intended direction.

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There is also an official free app to test the shoes on SideQuest, if you want to try them without having to download games from the Store.

The same Cybershoes Gaming System I received is also compatible with PC (you just have to attach the receiver to an USB port of your gaming PC), and there you can find many compatible games on Steam, like for instance Half-Life: Alyx or The Wizards.

SDK

There is an SDK to make your content compatible with Cybershoes, if you are interested. I have given it a fast look, and it is pretty easy to be used and very well documented.

Battery

According to the official website, the Cybershoes battery lasts up to 9 hours. A single charge was ok for me to make all the tests, so the battery duration is super-approved.

Are they good?

The manufacturing quality of the Cybershoes is very good and the system is interesting. When I read about them for the first time some years ago, I thought it was the stupidest idea ever, but then when I tried them at Gamescom, I found them nice. Now, after some more thorough tests in my office, I can confirm that the Cybershoes are a very interesting idea, but they need improvement.

Walking while being seated gives you great comfort (because you don’t need to be standing) and also removes the motion sickness. I also have to say that the Cybershoes are pretty fun to be used: moving the legs as if you had to walk is liberating, amusing, and also helps you in staying fit while playing videogames.

The walking detection is shaky and sometimes two consecutive steps at the same intended speed get detected with two different speeds, or one gets missed totally. The worst case is when one step forward gets detected as a backward one. The more you tune the system and the more you learn how to walk with it, the more these problems appear less frequently, but they are always there sometimes. And in action games where you need some precision to know where you are going on, you can’t afford to have shoes that sometimes make you find 1m forward and sometimes 2m backward from where you intended to be, e.g. to take cover from an enemy, because this could make you die. The system is absolutely usable, but not so precise as a joystick. So it is better to use them for games that are more forgiving, like adventure ones, or social VR spaces, or shooters where you just have to shoot without thinking.

Furthermore, walking is nice and helps you in staying fit, but it is also tiresome: I can’t imagine playing for 2-3 hours consecutively this way, because I would feel tired as if I had walked outside for hours. You decide if this is something that you want or not.

Cybershoes on Quest 2

At the Gamescom, I played with the Cybershoes installed with a Vive. Today, playing them with the Quest, I realized how much it is better to use them with a standalone headset. I can rotate how many times I want around with the stool without having to worry about a damn cable that can twist, and I can move my head however I want without feeling the cable. Furthermore, this lets me install my Gaming Station wherever I want, and not necessarily close to a PC. I think that Quest (or whatever other standalone headsets) is the way the Cybershoes are meant to be used.

Price

The full Cybershoes gaming station costs now $285 on Kickstarter, for an expected market price of $399.

Final impressions

All in all, I’m satisfied with the Cybershoes: they have a good design, they are manufactured very well, and they offer a comfortable experience. They offer a new innovative way of walking in VR, that while it may seem silly, actually works and can also make you walk without giving you motion sickness. Furthermore, I found it amusing walking with them, and I found the experience more entertaining than just using the thumbsticks.

But I also think that these devices have still to be tuned: the walking detection still makes too many errors, and this may be annoying in some games where you need accuracy. Using Cybershoes is very tiresome in the long run, and while this can be great for fitness, it can frustrating if you just intend to relax a bit in VR.

As everything now in VR, the device is good for Early Adopters, but it is not ready for the mainstream market yet.

If you want to fund this interesting project, you can support it on Kickstarter (that are many stretch goals still available) on this page.

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And that’s it for this review! As always, if you have questions, feel free to ask them in the comments! Otherwise, please subscribe to my newsletter and share this article with your peers!