True Player Gear reveals alternative to Oculus Rift

True Player Gear, a five employee startup based in Montreal, Canada, has revealed a virtual reality head-mounted display very similar to the Oculus Rift, tentatively called Totem.

True Player Gear says it’s been developing Totem for the last nine years. According to its website, it offers a 90 degrees field of view, 1080p OLED screen, and will support PC, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Xbox 360. The company said it talked to Epic Games, and that it would be really easy to support Unreal Engine 4, as well as CryEngine, Havok, and Unity. In addition, True Player Gear says it’s currently working on positional tracking using onboard cameras, which in the future could also be used for augmented reality functionality.

True Player Gear will launch a Kickstarter in the next few months and hopes to raise a minimum of $500,000. If it succeeds, it hopes to ship Totem by Christmas. The company says that since Totem has hardware acceleration, cameras, and more, “it will cost just a little bit more than Oculus, but nothing outrageous.” The Oculus Rift Development Kit will sell for $350.

“We didn’t initially intend to make any announcement,“ the company said on Reddit. “But we feel that with the news of a corporation buying Oculus, who is focused on web applications and doesn’t understand the hardware business like others do, we really need to come out of the woods and let everyone know that there is an alternative that is coming soon. We are in the last stretch of developing a final 5th gen prototype and are aiming to present a finished dev kit on Kickstarter in the next few months.”

If you need to catch up with the biggest news of the week, make sure you read everything you need to know about Facebook buying Oculus for $2 billion.

Emanuel Maiberg is a freelance writer. You can follow him on Twitter @emanuelmaiberg and Google+.
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