Canada-based Vrvana is hoping that its Kickstarter campaign will give it the funds that the company needs to develop the Totem virtual reality headset.
Vrvana is looking to raise C$350,000 to bring the device, which will be a competitor to the Oculus Rift and Morpheus, to the market.
"The Totem is a premium developer kit with unique features and plenty of onboard horsepower to experience immersive and engaging VR," Vrvana writes on the Totem's Kickstarter page.
With the VR headset's collection of unique features, Totem just might be a worthy competitor to the already established Oculus Rift and Morpheus VR projects.
The Totem can connect to any HDMI source, which includes computers, gaming consoles, Blu-Ray players, tablet computers, and many more, which plays SbS (Side-by-Side) 3D games or videos. The ability of the Totem to connect to multiple devices and platforms makes the headset a worthy investment.
Current models of VR headsets restrict the movements of users within the field of view of the device's external tracking camera. If the user moves out of the range of the cameras, then the device will not be able to continue to track the user's movements. Totem aims to address this problem by using internal on-board cameras to give the user unrestricted movement while using the device.
Totem users can also switch back and forth from the virtual reality world to the real world through a touch of a button, using the same on-board cameras. By pressing the button the user will be able to see out of the headset into the real world using the cameras, so that there will be no need to take off the headset.
Totem's performance is also topnotch, with very low latency that leads to no lagging between the user's movements and the display. The company's hardware acceleration system promises users with a faster and more natural immersion in virtual reality.
Totem does not only focus on video though, with Vrvana stating that the audio is just as important in the entire experience and so includes surround sound in stereo for the headset. Vrvana said that the company has teamed up with Sonomax to pledge specially designed eers stereo lightweight earbuds to pledgers in the Kickstarter campaign.
Vrvana also said that the company designed its very own optics for the Totem, which has individual focus for each of the user's eyes. The headset also features short-sided vision so that users wearing glasses will not have them smashed in between their face and the headset.
Lastly, Vrvana said that the two main processing components of the Totem are both upgradable with updates to their firmware, which will allow the headset to adapt to the evolving trends of virtual reality.
Vrvana believes that virtual reality can be applied to more than just video games, but Totem is now compatible with DK1 Rift games, with DK2 Rift games compatibility coming soon.
