Hands-On: The Roto VR Explorer Chair Turns You In VR

The Roto VR Explorer attempts to change the way you engage with VR experiences by using motorized 360-degrees spinning motion and haptic feedback. Officially listed as a Made For Meta product and priced around $800, we took the Explorer for a spin. Read on for our hands-on report.

Roto’s aim with the Explorer is to entice VR gamers who crave a seated experience that’s a step up from traditional swivel chairs. In the Roto Explorer, you feel the sensation of rotation provided by the chair’s motor activated by an included tracking puck that is attached to the top of a headset, causing the chair to rotate itself to match the direction of your gaze. In select titles that use the Roto VR SDK, of which only one exists so far, the chair instead rotates to match the position of the virtual vehicle you’re in, adding a deeper sense of realism.

Unboxing and Setup

Weighing in at a whopping seventy-five pounds, the Explorer package required some muscle and a little bit of assistance to maneuver from the porch into my setup area. Thanks to a well-organized manual and easy-to-follow video guide, after about 30 minutes of contorting myself across my living room floor, I found myself perched atop a modern-looking stool with adjustable seat height and footrest, a built-in cable management system, and onboard haptics.

Once it was all set up I strapped on the included head tracking puck completing a full 360-degree turn was fluid and the chair is responsive to rapid direction changes. The Roto Explorer also features built-in haptics via a transducer bolted to the seat bottom, but the effect in most games is little more than repurposed bass translated into vibrations from the seat cushion. There is a Roto SDK developers can add to enhance this, but from my time in the chair the haptics are nothing like the feeling you might get in specific areas of your body from vests like bHaptics. That said, wearing one of those vests in combination with using the chair could be a thrilling experience.

Gameplay Testing 

While I initially thought the Roto Explorer would be amazing for racing and flying games, I quickly remembered those kind of games really wouldn’t be a good fit for this chair in its current state due to the fact that it currently has no form of VR motion compensation. Elliott Myers, founder at Roto VR, tells UploadVR they’re working on first party motion compensation software that would allow virtual environments to react to the movements of the chair, and vice versa.

Without motion compensation in place, as you turn the wheel in a virtual car or tilt the stick of an aircraft to the side, the seat won’t change its physical direction to match your new virtual direction. So games like Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 and Assetto Corsa EVO are not better in this chair than any other, though we’ll follow up if that changes.

What is a good fit for the Roto Explorer, though, are VR games with gaze-based directional movement. That means titles like Iron Man VR and SWARM 2 where you already tilt your head as part of your movement. These match up their gameplay incredibly well to the chair’s effects.

Iron Man VR’s gaze-based navigation seemed synced up with the rotations of the chair. Pulling off superhero maneuvers high above the ground, as I turned fluidly in the direction of my gaze, the chair amplified my sense that I was actually flying as Tony Stark freshly suited up in a Mark V flying freely through the skies.

Switching to SWARM and SWARM 2, I navigated their familiar and chaotic worlds in ways I never had. Swinging and flying across the maps provided a visceral intensity. The chair’s responsiveness kept pace with my rapid head movements, and the tracking felt solid. The rotating chair turned this game I had played so many times into something a bit different, helping me become more fully immersed.

Testing FPS and action titles felt a bit odd at first. I’ve played a lot of VR shooters from the comfort of my regular office chair over the years, but feeling the seat rotate as I turned my head took some getting used. After a few minutes though, I started to see the utility in having this chair as a gameplay enhancement in these titles. You can turn pretty quickly to face on an oncoming enemy and this was a cool feeling, although not as much a game changer as the sensations you get in titles with flying or swinging involved.

The last game I tested, and currently the one and only native game to use the Roto SDK, was Dig VR. Hopefully we’ll see more developers incorporating the Roto VR SDK into games where use of the chair would feel appropriate. At the time of this writing, if you buy a Roto VR Explorer, Dig VR is the only natively working game available.

Motorized Swivel VR?

The spinning mechanism and haptic feedback of the Roto VR Explorer does provide a more immersive gaming experience for certain titles, adding an exhilarating layer of physical sensations to VR gameplay. It’s also relatively quiet during operation, provided the rumble feature is turned off, which is a plus for late-night gaming sessions in family households or apartment buildings where you don’t want to disturb the neighbors. For such an expensive chair, though, the comfort could be much better. I’m 5’11” and weigh around 260 pounds, and found the rounded stool-like seat and chair’s low back were too small and stiff for my body type. After about 20-30 minutes in the chair my hip and back started to hurt. This aching made me want to stop playing, which is not typical for seated VR sessions where I would normally spend several hours playing.

The footguard is also not permanently attached and, during some of my game testing sessions, my feet would brush against it, causing the loosely fitting plastic shell to shift out of place. This triggers a very shrill alarm, creating a jarring distraction during intense moments of gameplay. The alarm is so loud that the sound has been the subject of a few complaints from my family members. I hope in the future Roto VR provides a way to either turn this volume down or, even better, just disable the alarm altogether.

Comfort Enhancements On The Way

While at CES this year I tried comfort and quality of life upgrades on the way from Roto VR. The demo at the booth featured a full seat back and various controller attachments that look to make the experience more comfortable and functional. While there, I also talked to Steve Corrigan from Roto VR about the company’s latest efforts.

We’ve opted to publish this hardware analysis as a hands-on breakdown rather than a formal review because, while we think this is interesting for our readers to know about, Roto VR needs to gain more native support from developers and offer solid motion compensation for traditional simulator style games to warrant serious consideration. We’ll revisit this hardware for a full review in the future once we have had a chance to test out the comfort enhancements and if the company should see broader developer support.

Overall, the Roto VR Explorer chair does deliver an innovative approach to seated VR and one that enhances the immersive qualities of certain games. My time spent playing games like Iron Man VR and SWARM 2 was exhilarating, but reconciling these standout experiences with the chair’s cost isn’t going to work out right now for the vast majority of VR owners.

While I enjoyed my time using the Roto VR Explorer, I can’t justify replacing my regular and very comfortable swivel chair. A seat that turns you in VR is an interesting idea, but with only one game officially supported, no motion compensation, comfort issues for plus-sized players out of the box and an entry price of $800, there’s a long way to go before Roto is ready to change the way most people enjoy seated VR.