CES 2025: Roto VR Explorer

There’s a few options out there for motion in VR and today I checked out Roto VR and their Roto VR Explorer rotating chair. Retailing for $799 for the base unit, the Roto VR Explorer looks to add some nice motion to those who game in VR as well as help those who get a little motion sickness when it comes to gaming in an HMD.

The simple chair sits on top of a base that allows it to spin 360 degrees. There’s a dongle that lets you connect any VR headset and pair it up to the chair via Bluetooth. The setup will then take into account where your head is facing and rotate the chair where it needed to be.

Not only does the chair spin, but there’s haptics built into the chair. That means at times you can feel feedback in the seat in certain situations. So not only is there movement with the Roto VR Explorer, but there’s tactile feedback as well with haptics.

At the base level, there aren’t any arm rests but there is a foot rest so you can rest your feet on the platform while it spins around. It was pretty comfortable sitting on it. Support on both the back and the seat seem solid with my time in it.

Roto has a few expansion products that can take your chair to the next level. On display were the flight sim option allowing a HOTAS setup to be attached to the chair. Coming to the future will be the driving sim setup where you can attach a wheel and a set of pedals. I imagine you could grab one of the flight sim setups to attach to it if you want to add a mounting point for your stick shift and/or hand brake.

While the basic chair is pretty straight forward in terms of setup, you can add a head rest and arm rests for an additional cost. I think the reason they don’t include it in the base model is that if you want to use the chair in VR, arm rests can get in the way depending on the game you play. So rather than include them if you aren’t going to use them, Roto decided to make that as an optional accessory.

With game controllers such as HOTAS or racing wheels, you plug the controller into the Roto VR Explorer at the base and it tracks the movements of that. There wasn’t a setup that enabled testing out of that setup in place, but I can see the Roto VR Explorer being really fun with simulations.

Weighing in at around 70 lbs, there are wheels in the base that help for easy transport. Should you want to move it around, it shouldn’t be too hard to do so. There’s good cable management for controllers and there’s just one or two cables that run out from the chair depending on if you need to plug a USB cable to a computer as well as the power cable for the chair.

As you can probably imagine with the chair being connected via Bluetooth to the puck in a very noisy setting that is CES, my experience was in less than ideal conditions. With that while the chair’s turn was delayed a bit from what I was doing, it was smooth and can at times be quick. When it was working as expected, it was pretty fun to feel the movement of a turn as I turned my head while in an Iron Man suit. It’s not fast enough where it’ll fling you out of the chair, but you do feel the transition from one direction to another pretty well on quick movements. The strength of the turns as well as the strength of the haptics can be adjusted if it’s not too much or not enough.

For those who can’t do VR well and are prone to motion sickness, a product like the Roto VR Explorer can help tremendously. Just having your body move a little bit while in VR can help overcome that motion sickness feeling.

I think for those wanting a more simplistic setup for flight sims or driving games, the Roto VR Explorer could be a good choice where you aren’t going to get the pitch and yaw of motion simulators but you’ll get the horizontal motion for those types of games. It will depend on how well the translation of controller movement to chair movement feels.

Roto VR Explorer is available now with the add-ons for flight sims and driving games coming soon.