true player gear totem vr headset oculus rift competitor alternative

Road to VR talks with Bertrand Nepveu, the CEO and Founder of True Player Gear. They’re working on a VR headset, which will compete with the Oculus Rift, called ‘Totem.’ The company created quite a buzz in the VR world since announcing their existence following the Facebook acquisition of Oculus VR.

The True Player Gear Totem is a VR headset with similar specs to the Oculus Rift DK2. The final spec is planned to include a 1080p OLED display with low persistence and a 90 degree field of view. Unlike the Rift, it also has two 1080p cameras on the front that will allow for passthrough video and positional tracking. It contains onboard stereo surround sound and will have compatibility with PCs as well as game consoles.

The Totem, which was announced shortly after Facebook’s Oculus buyout, appeared to some to be vaporware or an empty promise. To others, it appeared to be the best alternative for those wanting to jump off the Oculus Rift boat. Bertrand Nepvue was kind enough to speak with me to set the story straight.

Road to VR: Other than posting a few teasers, you haven’t talked to any news outlets yet. Why come out now?

Nepveu: To be honest, for me to give Road to VR the first interview is really important. I have been following Road to VR for some time, and the community is very important to me. We know that our product isn’t mass market ready yet, and we still have a few milestones to achieve. We want to build a core group of fans that are willing to experiment a little bit, and then once we nail all of the core problems, we can go mass market.

Road to VR: You’ve put out a few posts online that caused quite a number of skeptics to speak out, including myself. What do you think about that?

Nepveu: It’s normal. Competition is good, but I don’t see Oculus as a competitor, right now I see them as a fellow company who is trying to make VR the next big thing. So, when I saw all of the opposition and the rants on the internet, I was stunned. We were trying to give people hope, that there was another option. We tried to put out as many details as possible so we don’t seem fake.

When Facebook bought Oculus, some of the concerns were from the indie developers, who spent so much time on their games, and are ready to release it. But now they see that Facebook is involved, and they don’t know whether things will change for them. When I posted about our product, I only did it in the VR section of reddit because I didn’t want this to go mainstream yet. I knew that there would be a group of developers that would be happy to hear that there is an alternative.

“Competition is good, but I don’t see Oculus as a competitor, right now I see them as a fellow company who is trying to make VR the next big thing”

News about our product didn’t go viral until the day after we posted it. Someone shared it in the technology section of reddit and we started getting loads of hits to our site. Some people have said that we are being opportunistic and this is a marketing scam. Did we want to let developers know we existed? Yes. Did we want to start doing interviews and get all of this attention? No. That was not my plan, because we are still a month or two away from releasing a press demo.

Road to VR: How big is your team and what is your background?

Nepveu: We are a team of five people. We have outside consultants, but the core group is five people. We are all engineers, two computer engineers and three electrical engineers. We started with just two of us, and slowly added more people. We knew we didn’t want to miss the VR wave, so we added more.

Road to VR: Let’s address some of the points of contention that have arisen about your product. Let’s start with how long you’ve been a company and how long you’ve been working on this. People are skeptical about the fact that you have been working for nine years on a VR headset.

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3rd Generation Prototype
3rd Generation Prototype of Totem

Nepveu: A bit of history first then. I was doing my MBA in 2004-05, and I was reading an article about the Xbox 360. I am a big gamer, and I love both consoles and PC games. I knew back then that in order to have a good VR experience, you needed to have a controlled environment, and to be plug-and-play. If people had a bad time with VR, it would crash and burn. For me, VR redemption would have to come from a console. For the first time in history, with the Xbox 360, a console will be able to have enough power to give a good VR experience.

So, I started to look for components on the internet, which led me to find a few VGA [640×480] resolution microdisplays. From there, I contacted one of my ex-colleagues and asked him if he wanted to work on this to see if we could make something for VR. Back then, the screens were terrible, and we had to use accelerometers since gyroscopes and other sensors didn’t even exist yet. This caused our first generation HMD to have really bad drift, and we knew there was no way we could put this on the market. As newer and better parts became available, we made a second generation. People ask us why it took us nine years, and I tell them, ‘VR is hard and you need a great experience, and the technology was not there yet’.

“People can say that we copied, but we had been working on this for so long”

Last year at CES, we showed a few companies our third generation prototype. It had SVGA [800×600] screens and a 45 degree field of view. We wanted a higher field of view, but the microdisplays were so small that the lenses were already cumbersome enough. At the time, other HMDs were only showing 45 degrees, so we felt that we were okay. We hadn’t seen the Oculus Rift yet.

Road to VR: Now that we know this story, I am curious as to your reaction to Palmer Luckey and John Carmack coming out and showing off their Rift for the first time.

Nepveu: I had mixed feelings. The first time I heard about them was the John Carmack video at E3. I thought, if John Carmack is excited about it, there must be something to it. The timing was funny. We were about to show our prototype in Boston to the company that was providing our microdisplays. I worked all night to finish everything. The next morning, I see the Rift video, and I said to myself, here is one more guy who is bringing some new ideas to VR, and maybe it will do something great. When the Kickstarter began, I ordered one.

With our microdisplays, there was no screen door, there was no latency, everything was crisp and quick, but it wasn’t immersive. The first time I tried our Rift, the screen door effect and blurring made me think that the RIft would crash and burn. I had a headache after playing Team Fortress 2. I tried it again a few days later, again with Team Fortress 2, and I had a breakthrough moment. Eventually, my body got used to it and I was able to ignore the screen door. I was dodging rockets and moving around and I was really having fun. Then, I looked down and saw my body and realized that I wasn’t controlling an avatar, I was the avatar. That was the moment that we decided to scrap the 45 degree field of view and had to go 90 degrees. It was hard because we had been working with microdisplays for so long. But that is the way technology works. If there is a breakthrough that can make your product better, you use it.

People can say that we copied, but we had been working on this for so long, and our tracking was already really good. We just decided to switch to the different screen. A microdisplay cost $100 apiece and we needed two of them. With the Rift at $300, we would never be able to compete with that with our current technology.

Road to VR: Let talk about your current model and design. The specs are similar to the Oculus Rift DK2. 1080p OLED with low persistence, 90 degree FOV, positional tracking, etc. You have one feature that the Rift does NOT have, two cameras in front. Are they meant for tracking or passthrough or both?

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Nepveu: They are multipurpose. There are two 1080p cameras on the front. Passthrough will work right out of the box. Once you have the optics set up, you won’t need to wear your glasses. We have our own optics optimized for an OLED screen. They will be able to focus for you to compensate for your prescription. You want to find your keyboard and not take off your HMD, you hit a button and you will be able to see through the cameras. We will also use them for positional tracking. There are several thoughts on how to do this. We felt the best way to do it would be the way the brain does it, similar to what Valve showed. With two cameras, you can calculate distance and depth with external markers, probably LEDs, strategically placed in your environment.

5th Generation Prototype Case
5th Generation Prototype Case

Road to VR: The cameras are not going to be movable. How are you going to account for people having different IPDs and want to use the passthrough option?

Nepveu: It’s like when they film a 3D movie. It is done at an average distance. We have set our IPD for the cameras at the average 64mm. Since we have a 1080p screen, there is enough room that we can artificially crop and shift the image from the cameras to give a different IPD.

Road to VR: Your lenses will be able to adjust for my glasses prescription. Oculus is providing different lenses, what are you doing?

Nepveu: The lens just needs to be closer or farther away from the screen to compensate for your prescription. You can adjust that using the knobs on the top of our HMD. Also, like The Oculus Rift, we have knobs to adjust the distance from the face.

Road to VR: Since you have cameras with passthrough, is there a chance that we can use the Totem VR headset for augmented reality as well?

Nepveu: It is certainly possible. We are interested in seeing what the development community will create. The hardware supports it, there just needs to be software developed. There is a lot of opportunity there.

Road to VR: You spoke about doing a crowd-funded campaign in the next few months with hopes to gather $500K. What are your plans?

Nepveu: One of the main problems is that you need to have enough people supporting you. The unintentional attention we got from reddit in the last few days will help our chances for success. We worked so long and so hard that we don’t want to fail. Investors want validation. Venture capitalists need validation before they will invest. We aren’t planning on giving ourselves big salaries or anything. Crowdfunding will take care of the machining and the development. $500K will allow us to break even. Would we love to get more, but that is up to the community to decide.

“The unintentional attention we got from reddit in the last few days will help our chances for success. We worked so long and so hard that we don’t want to fail.”

Road to VR: Is your expectation that you will build 50K development kits? What do you think the cost would be for a development kit?

Nepveu: That would be a great thing, but we are aiming more at 1,000-2,000 units. Our cost will be a bit more than the Oculus Rift because we are providing more hardware and more options for developers to play with. We are seeing in the forums that people are willing to pay a bit more for the added features we are providing. That is what we are focusing on in the next month or two. We want to get our pricing solidified and determine costs.

Road to VR: You’ve mentioned that you are planning on getting a development kit out by Christmas. What about a consumer product?

Nepveu: Right now, our current model is 1080p. We think that the screen needs to be better for a consumer product. The problem is that a 4K screen requires a really good graphics card to push it. It is about the balance between power and performance. We are really focusing on the development kit first and see what developers think of it.

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totem4Road to VR: How about your latency and the weight of your product?

Nepveu: We are using a lot of similar technology as Oculus. We do strobing like them for low persistence. We have hardware acceleration. I don’t see how it could be much different from the Oculus Rift. As far as weight goes, we don’t have an exact number yet because we are still assembling our latest generation. It will be heavier than the Rift because we have larger optics, and other components, but it will not be much more.

Road to VR: You claim that Totem will be able to work with a variety of consoles. How is that possible?

Nepveu: Similar to the injection drivers that are available [for the Oculus Rift], some games will work, some won’t. Our original focus in the beginning was to be compatible with the Xbox 360. Our patents focus on that. We knew that Microsoft wasn’t going to support us, so we went the direction of emulating the gamepad. Looking around with your HMD controls the thumb stick movement. Ideally, a 3D SBS game is what we want, but we have the ability to use frame buffering to handle other 3D options. Will it be perfect? It will depend on the type of game and what the developers decide to make. If it turns out that there won’t be enough titles for it, then we will drop that feature. We could even try to emulate Sony’s Morpheus down the road.

Road to VR: Are you planning on releasing an SDK?

Nepveu: Many game engines are already adding HMD support. One of the problems in the industry is that there isn’t a standard. Our plan is to have as small an SDK as possible. Steam is really big, and gives a console experience on the PC. We want to provide users with as easy an experience as possible. We prefer to integrate with OpenVR which is an existing SDK and is a good standard.

Road to VR: Do you have any patents for your technology?

Nepveu: The worst thing that could happen right now in the VR community is a patent war. If companies start to go back and forth with patents, it will kill every little project. Valve has the right idea with sharing their knowledge about presence. We applied for two patents, but suing others is definitely not part of our business plan.

Road to VR: Many people are looking at your product as the best alternative to the Oculus Rift since they don’t like the news about Facebook purchasing them. What is your response to that? Are you going to maintain the community spirit and not sell out?

Nepveu: I read an article in the New York Times that Facebook may have purchased Oculus too early because they don’t have a consumer product yet. When I heard the news, I originally thought it was a joke. When I finally came to terms with it, I realized that this might be good for us. When Oculus started posting that they couldn’t believe the negative response to the news, I thought that maybe they should have asked the community first before making this decision. Can I say that we will stay independent forever? No. Is the community important to us? Yes. We would get the pulse of the community before making a decision like that.

Road to VR: Why the name ‘Totem’?

Nepveu: It isn’t our final name. Things change with time. A Totem is a reference to the movie, Inception. Their Totem allows them to know if they are in the real world or a simulation. We plan to do a survey and let the community name it. We trust the community.

True Player Gear is based in Montreal, Canada. Once a working prototype is available, Road to VR will be there to test it out first hand. To keep up with news on their product as is becomes available, sign up for the mailing list at their website. I’d like to thank Bertrand Nepveu for taking the time to answer our questions.

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  • Ryan

    Great interview, clears up a lot of misconceptions.

  • Gerald Terveen

    ohh great, give em even more visibility …

    questions I would like to have seen here:

    – you claim Xbox One compatability, how will you address:

    – FOV in non VR games?
    – HUD elements in non VR games?
    – neck model if you try to just emulate stick movements?
    – how do you emulate stick movement on the Xbox One?

    at least you can take from the article that they do not even have a working prototype and just hope to solve their tracking solution. they are too early to get attention, shit like this just puts expectations into customers heads “No I won’t buy a consumer Rift just yet, I wait for that model with the cameras!” …

    • True Player Gear

      We use 90 FOV, to minimize the screen door effect and make the HUD not too far away in your field of vision. You are right, it’s a neck model for current game, but developers can come with positional tracking VR games by developing Indie Games on the Xbox and PlayStation. Stick emulation is tricky but it’s part on one of our patent.

      We said that we aim for a demo at E3, which is now far away. Our Optics, Mechanics and Electronics are done, we just need to finish some C and VHDL code.

      I know you are skeptic, but we didn’t work all theses years for nothing!

      • Oliver

        Yea, give them a chance. ;)

        I have to admit i can’t imagine stick emulation working anywhere convincingly, but i’m ready to be convinced of the opposite. With a mouse i can see that with the right settings you could get to a sorta 1:1 conversion of head motion. But joystick-look is working differently, you just tell the amount of camera rotation velocity, not rotation directly. So yea, dazzle me ;)

        But i really like the idea of the two cameras! This might actually help a lot during development beside the obvious idea of augumented reality.

      • Isaiah

        Alright, you have me conviccd enough to try the Dev-Kit when it’s ready. I love the pledge to use the openSDK and your participation with us and answering our questions.

      • EdZ

        That doesn’t address ANY of those concerns!

        The three core components of not-losing-your lunch VR are:
        1) LATENCY! IS! KING!
        2) Tracking (1:1)
        3) User’s head movement has priority (i.e. don’t futz with the horizon, don’t spin the camera)
        Existing console games respect NONE of these!

        You mention a head/neck model, which is something no current console game implements. FoV will have minimal effect on screen-door (that’s governed by the fill-factor of the panel), and neither will it deal with the HUD (which will end up at screen-depth in any stereo-aware game, which is absolutely the wrong place for VR). In fact, a 90° FoV will make things WORSE, as your HUD will end up distorted or clipped entirely at the periphery of the display.

        Converting existing console games to VR with in-device warping and stick-emulation is technically possible in the same way position-tracking with a 30fps 320×240 consumer webcam is technically possible. Both will provide an irredeemably poor experience.

        It sounds like you have picked up on a bunch of buzzwords but are not entirely sure what they mean, and hope that few enough will notice if you cram them into the same sentence. “We use 90 FOV, to minimize the screen door effect and make the HUD not too far away in your field of vision.” doesn’t even make any logical sense!

  • monographix

    Very nice interview. Can you tell us what is the angle of view of cameras?
    Also, if we can already give our suggestions for the name, then my is “Voir” or “VoiR“. I think it’s an obvious pun for Canadians. :D

    • True Player Gear

      We use standard M12 lenses, so for now it’s 79 degrees, but it might change with more experimentation.

    • True Player Gear

      Great suggestion, we will add it to our Survey.

      • monographix

        No problem. If it gets named like that, send me at least T-shirt. :D

  • Lenny Zimmermann

    Very interesting and worth seeing more entries potentially coming to market. I think the more systems that also support open SDK standards is also a good thing. I’ll be interested in seeing how things pan out for these guys.

    • True Player Gear

      Thanks! We like Open Standard too!

  • Maddy25

    In my opinion so far this has been the best marketing for a VR headset.
    Announcing a product after the biggest competitor split up their community is huuuge.
    Im excited to see more about this HMD !

  • snake0

    Yeah, I’m sure it’s just all a big coincidence that they released info right after the Facebook debacle. Not standing on anyone’s coattails at all!

    The whole thing seems damn fishy to me.

    • True Player Gear

      It’s not a coincidence, we explained why in the interview.

    • Isaiah

      That’s just good marketing.

  • Kemic

    Well, I am interested in seeing what other developers of VR equipment are gonna come out of the woodwork to try and pick up the market of users who are highly against a company like Facebook buying out Oculus.
    In the meantime, I’m gonna keep my dk2 on order and holding onto my dk1 as collector items if nothing else.

  • elecman

    Using cameras on the headset to do positional tracking can work great, look at Valve. However, it also requires you to place the LEDs or markers everywhere in your room, not just in front of you. I don’t think the average consumer will be happy with that.

    One other thing you could try is using SLAM tracking. But this requires a huge amount of processing, is slow, and doesn’t handle dynamic scenes very well where people walk around or lighting conditions change.

    • True Player Gear

      I didn’t mentioned it, but SLAM tracking is our goal with the Consumer Version.

      Thanks for your interest!

      Bert

  • elecman

    Bert, Did you talk to 13th Lab? They have a new SLAM SDK which runs on mobile devices so it seems they have tackled the performance issue. The tracking seems pretty stable too.

    Not sure about latency though. RGB cameras are not exactly well known for their snappy response. Maybe if you can get SLAM embedded it will make a difference?

  • elecman

    Also, in order to do reliable and snappy SLAM tracking, you need a high FOV camera (180 degree fisheye). This has been widely published in academic papers and also confirmed by 13th Lab.

    From the kickstarter comments:
    “…the underlying tech works without the fisheye, but the tracking quality is reduced enough that it would not work well enough in a fast action gaming scenario (the fisheye makes it more robust to fast movements, especially fast turning movements).”

    How are you going to address this with the Totem?

  • Christoher

    sorry dude still think Oculus CV1 will be the better buy, maybe if your still around after facebook really starts to influence the teck and F- things up for the rest of us. not to say your team isnt talented, but now OR has the cash to get far more talent then you. with even Valvs VR team jumping ship to join them

  • Christoher

    and sound like befor the rift you were not making anything but another media display that you strap to your face.

    all well Oculus need Compatition like you if we want to keep them honest.

  • Curtrock

    Something occurred to me this morning. If you think about books like Snow Crash, or Ready Player One, they both refer to the dream of a “Metaverse” or “Oasis”; a virtual universe that is online and everyone can connect and interact with each other. Now, what would be the most comparable equivalent to an online community where everyone can connect, communicate, share info, play games, and just plain have fun, together? Yup! Facebook is like the primitive, text-version of the “Metaverse”. A place where over 1 billion users log into every day to connect with each other. Just sayin…..

  • elecman

    Also, SLAM only has a positional accuracy of only sub-centimetre. That is not enough for VR as it will be jittery. See this video:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=e7bjsIqlbS0

  • SpartanWP

    Supportng Xbox 360 would be great because with the Oculus Rift, it will cost another $800 for a decent PC to run your games. One thing I can not see in the images of the Totem is the interface to the PC or Xbox, will you be using cables or wifi?