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Totem Kickstarter = Kicking a dead horse

Gizmotweak
Explorer
Looks like the Totem Kickstarter is going to fail.... :cry:

http://www.kicktraq.com/projects/2091603040/totem-the-premium-full-featured-virtual-reality-he/#char...

I wonder why it is doing so miserably...maybe proof of concept is more important than fancy cg rendered casings and pie in the sky promises of ridiculous specs and performance with no proof of actual function.

After all, Luckey showed a working proof of concept put together with duct tape and spit and he pulled in 2.5 million.

I suspect if they had actually shown a working prototype that was comparable to somewhere between dk1 and dk2 they would have had no problem pulling in their modest goal of 350k in a week...so much for secret sauce...

Still with 5 guys 9 years and a secret lab and canadian government grants, they should have been much further along.

No excuse for this imho.

But then based on some of the comments on their kicknonstarter, their typical backers seems to be of those "OMG I HATEZ FACEBOOK OCULUS SOLD OUT CARMACK SUXZORS LUCKEY RAPED MY CHILDHOOD FOAM RAGE FOAM" kind of people.
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69 REPLIES 69

Sharpfish
Heroic Explorer
Just a guess but because we already have Oculus and they have done so well so far, and got a great team together a lot of people who may have given backing probably don't see the point. I think it's already obvious that Oculus have assembled probably the best team in the world for the specific problems faced by VR and the visionaries and technical geniuses are gonna be hard for any alternative HMD maker to compete with.

I haven't been able to feel even 1% excited or optimistic about any other HMD inc Totem and since Oculus proved how seriously they were taking VR. The only other HMD that vaugely interests me is Morpheus even with it's limits of PS4 mainly because Sony make some great games/software that could fit VR very well in the future years. I see them as complimentary as obviously the Rift will always exceed the power available on the PS4 so much like traditional games you get great VR exclusives on PS4 (ideally if it's VR takes off) and the rest and really powerful stuff on the Rift on PC.
EX DK2/VIVE/PSVR/CV1/Q2/PSVR2 | Currently Quest Pro (PCVR) | VR developer
RTX 3080 FE / 12900k / Windows 11 Pro

Hicks613
Heroic Explorer
They were doing well up until their incentive fiasco.

I backed them and found out that I qualified for a discount on their first model.

Then Kickstarter as well as VRVana sent out a a notification/apology stating that my backing was cancelled due to an offer that VRVana were not allowed to make.

I think they got off to a rocky start.

I'd like to see them succeed, but I haven't been signed in again to back them again.

james65
Honored Guest
-- Edited --

Gizmotweak
Explorer
I wonder if their kickstarter would have been successful if all this stuff actually worked and was demoed when they launched it instead of having to explain why it doesnt work and how it will hopefully work...someday maybe.

At this point in the game with the big gorillas in the room like DK2 and its followup Crescent Bay and Morpheus and Gear, you have to have more than a wishlist and promises of soon and how you hope to make it work to compete.

I suspect that after the past two years of VR industry movement, Kickstarter Backers are much more savey now about VR and expect some Proof of concept(s)...that would have certainly helped them a lot.

Oh well, live and learn...maybe in another 9 years.
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brantlew
Adventurer
"Gizmotweak" wrote:
I suspect that after the past two years of VR industry movement, Kickstarter Backers are much more savey now about VR and expect some Proof of concept(s)...that would have certainly helped them a lot.


I think backers were savy 2 years ago. If you go back and look at the Oculus Kickstarter, almost everything that was promised were things that were already being publicly demonstrated - not long term R&D items. High FOV and low latency tracking were already being demonstrated and proven. The other items were all basic software - SDK and engine integrations were obviously tractable. So with Oculus it was obviously more of a scaling and manufacturing problem. VrVana really put themselves in a tough position because they are trying to get funding for basic R&D and then putting a tight deadline on it. That's a very risky thing to do because research rarely bends to schedules.

CaliberMengsk
Explorer
-_- probably aren't getting the support because it all seems very shady.

Even just this one sentence makes me think they are blowing smoke.

The Totem has access to two 1080P RGB/IR (infrared) cameras that run at 120Hz and are connected to a high-speed field-programmable gate array (FPGA) that can process SLAM data 14 times faster than an ARM processor.


Which arm processor? That's a blanket statement. They don't even give a series name (A8? A11?). The Cortex M3 for example is only 24mhz. It's not super hard to be 14 times faster, and I doubt that is the slowest speed chip arm makes.

I also don't trust anything in the video simply cause of the doctor. No doctor is going to talk in surgery scrubs. There are lot's of things that scream "RUN!" to me, and I've only glanced at the project.

Sorry if I seem to be a negative nancy recently, but this project just feels like a scam.

Gizmotweak
Explorer
"brantlew" wrote:
"Gizmotweak" wrote:
I suspect that after the past two years of VR industry movement, Kickstarter Backers are much more savey now about VR and expect some Proof of concept(s)...that would have certainly helped them a lot.


I think backers were savy 2 years ago. If you go back and look at the Oculus Kickstarter, almost everything that was promised were things that were already being publicly demonstrated - not long term R&D items. High FOV and low latency tracking were already being demonstrated and proven. The other items were all basic software - SDK and engine integrations were obviously tractable. So with Oculus it was obviously more of a scaling and manufacturing problem. VrVana really put themselves in a tough position because they are trying to get funding for basic R&D and then putting a tight deadline on it. That's a very risky thing to do because research rarely bends to schedules.


Exactly. You hit the nail on the head.
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Davideus
Honored Guest
@CaliberMengsk
I think they was referring to this:

(Though they mentioned this link in their article)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0141933111001244
The article introduces scan-matching genetic SLAM (SMG-SLAM), a novel SLAM algorithm. It is based on a genetic algorithm that uses scan-matching for gene fitness evaluation. The main scope of the article is to present a hardware implementation of SMG-SLAM using an field programmable gate array (FPGA). The architecture of the system is described and it is shown that it is up to 14.83 times faster compared to the software algorithm without significant loss in accuracy.


funny )))

james65
Honored Guest
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