Vrvana confirms in its latest Kickstarter update that it has decided to cancel the Totem campaign, the HMD compatible with all types of devices such as PCs, consoles and even multimedia players. Although they had reached a very important figure, above $180,000, the final goal doubled that amount and the pace of the campaign had completely decayed. But this is not the end of Totem.
In fact, it is already possible to pre-purchase Totem directly from the Vrvana website by making a payment of $ 50 for the reservation, to be discounted from the final price of the device that is estimated to be around $ 450, shipping costs and taxes not included, and whose first 1000 units are expected to ship in October 2015.
The reasons Vrvana gives us for the cancellation are that many of the VR enthusiasts prefer a fully polished finished version rather than a development kit, and since some of the features are still in development, many people have preferred to wait. In addition, the public considers that the price is very high considering the absence of such features, therefore Vrvana has decided to skip the development kit and focus all its efforts on the commercial version.
The technical characteristics of Totem are very striking: in addition to compatibility with all types of HDMI devices, the screen is OLED but with RGB matrix instead of pentile, also having two cameras that fulfill a double function: absolute positioning and augmented reality. Attention is also drawn to the fact that the distortion is performed by the device itself using hardware, necessary if we want to reproduce content that does not depend on a PC or custom software. Anyway, we’ll see what the future holds for Vrvana and Totem, since if the final version of the Rift is available by then they’re going to have it really complicated.
