This Canadian company recently revealed one of their projects that they've been working on for many years. It's called the Totem and from the looks of it, it's going to outshine the Oculus two-fold. Spec sheet: Screen 1080p OLED
USB mouse Playstation controller Xbox controller Non-game controls
Up, Down, Select/Real World View
Supported engines
Unreal Unity Havok CryEngine Platforms
PC Playstation 3 & 4 Xbox One & 360 Supported media
All 3D formats, SBS preferred Size 6.6″ x 4.4″ x 5.4″
(One of the features I also saw is called "Real world view" and from what I can tell, it uses the cameras on the front of the headset to see the real world, in case you need to find the keyboard or something.)
Now, this both makes me exited and nervous, because if this is near the same price of the oculus, I might cancel my devkit and make the switch to this. Sorry guys, but I'm being honest here. They haven't released any more information, but they want to release more soon. There is also a link included here. http://www.trueplayergear.com/
If all of the stats are true, then it looks to be above everything else, except perhaps for the field of view.
Man, I think this is gonna shake up the VR world very, very hard.
Facebook bought Instagram. How exactly did they ruin them?
"jherico" wrote: The only evidence of their work appears to be renders, a 3D printed 'case' which is based on the render, and what looks suspiciously like some toy night vision goggles.
That looks like a prototype of a micro-display-based HMD with cameras, maybe it's their old 45° FOV model?
Heh, they have been working on it for 9 years... translation:
Mike: "Hey bob remember 9 years ago at that pub we were talking about how cool it would be if we could make a VR headset"
Bob: "oooh yeah wow, I almost forgot about that"
Mike: "Well apparently there is this thing out called the Oculus Rift that is like what we wanted to do, and get this... they made a ton from a Kickstarter and recently were bought by facebook for a nice lump sum!"
Bob: "wow, we should have done this sooner then maybe microsoft could have bought us"
Mike: "yeah... hey let's throw somethign together and see if we can make some quick cash!"
Bob: " Hellllll yeah, sounds like we need another night at the Pub to brainstorm again!"
"rataum" wrote: This is looking like a 04/01 joke. :lol:
It's not, I was on their site a few days ago and the interview from road-to-vr was before the first of april too. I'm not too confident for this unless they get bigger. They only have a team of 5 engineers, compared to Oculus that's not really much for the moment. Then they will have their first DK at the end of this year when Oculus probably already has announced their CV.
I wouldn't go as far to call it a scam, maybe it's just a project from hobbyists who saw there chance after the FB acquisition.
What set Oculus apart from other HMD manufacturers IMHO was the focus on the best immersive experience possible: While a couple of companies sold HMDs, they were mostly low FoV, slower tracking - or non at all, no > 60Hz displays, no translational tracking, no latency testing etc. Bad VR will not succeed in the mass market.
I don't see this focus on the best possible VR experience with TruePlayerGear: All prototypes before the Rift were 45 degree FoV, no working translational tracking (yet), not the best plan for translational tracking (take it from a guy who has worked with computer vision: the outside-in tracking with one camera and an illuminated LED pattern as Oculus does it is way more reliable than marker-less inside-out tracking (it can be done and is the future, but you can spend many many man-years of development in this)). The distortion correction in the HMD will increase latency (vsynced rendered the distortion on the GPU eats a tiny bit of GPU-perf budget but does not increase latency, to do it on the HMD you need at least part of the frame before you start to calculate it - the whole frame in some cases).
And while being able to support consoles is special to this HMD, it is just emulating a gamepad and showing standard 3D content in the HMD. This means you don't get the correct FoV, not all degrees of freedom for head movements - even the possible movements are limited: what happens if I move my head faster as the game lets my character move his body? As it was already pointed out: This kind of console support will be way more limited as PC injection drivers.
So even if I can assume that this is no scam, I still doubt that this HMD will deliver a top VR experience.
Looks legit, but I won't commit anything to their Kickstarter if they don't show an actual prototype and can't prove that they won't get caught up in litigation before manufacturing and shipment.
Handling the warp on the device and emulating console controllers sure would make playing consoles easier. It eliminates needing a pc with a capture device, a cronus device (if you want head tracking), and some warping software to be able to play a console on the rift now. I know not a top VR experience, but it's a lot better than playing a console on a tv, for some games anyway. I would think a lot of people have consoles and no high end gaming pc.
"DeadlyJoe" wrote: ... prove that they won't get caught up in litigation before manufacturing and shipment.
That's quite a tall order, since you can get caught up in litigation for no reason whatsoever, regardless of whether the plaintiff has a legitimate case against you.
I have tried a lot of post-Rift VR HMDs and Sony is the only other company so far that has gotten the tracking, optics, and perspective right. And the more they advertise magical hardware solutions to software problems the more skeptical you should be.
