True Player Gear throwing hat into VR ring

[Tecknik]

http://www.trueplayergear.com/

http://www.reddit.com/r/virtualreality/comments/21g61f/true_player_gear_to_offer_an_alternative_to/

We are True Player Gear, a five employee tech startup based in Montreal, Canada.
We are gamers, we are passionate and we have a vision that we’ve been developing for the past nine years. We created a virtual reality headset for the real gamers like us out there.
Up to now we operated in stealth mode, except for the past two weeks were we started gradually broadcasting our existence (eg: VR Mixer @ GDC) in preparation for a Kickstarter campaign.
We didn’t initially intend to make any announcement. 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.
Specifications: 1080p low persistence OLED screen, 90 degrees FOV, head and body tracking, compatible with PC, PS3/4, Xbox One/360.
Features: hardware accelerated pre-lens distortion, hardware accelerated motion tracking, onboard cameras for positional tracking (WIP), expansion port for makers, surround sound via standard headphones, individual focus per eye for long and short sided peoples, oversized lenses for clearer text, and more!
We strongly stand by the developers and gamers community and as such we would like invite you all to participate in naming the fruit of our labor!
Picture : http://pic.twitter.com/wevhc2pF2H
More details coming soon on our website: http://www.trueplayergear.com

http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/128173-upset-by-facebook-s-oculus-rift-acquisition-never-fear-true-player-gear-is-here

Oculus Rift might have an altered future now that Facebook is in charge, but gamers need not fear. True Player Gear promises to be a replacement that offers all the awesomeness of the Rift and much more.

The six year old, five employee startup from Montreal in Canada aims to sate the wants and needs of developers who are turning their back on a Facebook-funded Oculus headset. At the moment the company simply has a website and a promotional video, featured at E3 way back in 2006, but True Player Gear's twitter feed claims the new version of its VR device will be demoed at E3 this June, with a Kickstarter project planned for the summer.

The headset will be Full HD with a 1920 x 1080 resolution display that uses OLED screens for a 90-degree field of view. Unlike the Oculus Rift, the True Player Gear also uses two 1080p cameras that will, potentially, allow developers and users to augment the reality around them should they choose to. Although the cameras are primarily listed for use in more accurate positional tracking.

Thanks to a host of sensors, users' head movements will be tracked allowing for virtual world scanning using real world movement. Built-in will be a 3-axis 1kHz gyro, a 3-axis 4kHz accelerometer and a 3-axis magnetometer – so it should be accurate.

Despite the promotional video showing no reference to gaming, the headset will be made to work with Xbox One and 360, PlayStation 3 and 4, plus PCs. It also supports multiple games development engines including Unreal, Unity, Havok and CryEngine.

More detailed specs were listed on a Reddit post by the company saying the headset will feature "hardware accelerated pre-lens distortion, hardware accelerated motion tracking, on-board cameras for positional tracking (WIP), expansion port for makers, surround sound via standard headphones, individual focus per eye for long and short sighted people, oversized lenses for clearer text, and more."

We'll be bringing you more details on the project as soon as we can. This could be the true rival to Sony's Project Morpheus. True Player Gear, in fact.

[Revalis]

Saw this as well.. and another, called the Glyph:

http://www.avegant.com/

Competition crawling out of all woodworks.

[Tbone]

The Glyph has been around for a while. It currently isn't a virtual reality device, but more of a virtual monitor/media viewer. It displays a very small, yet high resolution, image into the retina. It is not currently applicable to VR.

True Player Gear is, unfortunately, already doomed to fail. They are attempting to process and warp the image in the hardware itself instead of via the game engine. The end result will be just a hacked attempt at creating stereoscopic 3D out of images that were not designed to be played/viewed that way. Basically, the content has to be designed for VR to truly work, and True Player Gear doesn't provide for that possibility. I'll have to look more into it, but that's the impression the general VR community got out of it. Here is the ongoing discussion about it

[Sared]

The Glyph has been around for a while. It currently isn't a virtual reality device, but more of a virtual monitor/media viewer. It displays a very small, yet high resolution, image into the retina. It is not currently applicable to VR.

That sounds like what you said about Sony's 'media viewer', lol.

While the TPG does seem like a long-running project that's just now getting attention, but the Glyph seems to have a bit more to stand on. I'm particularly a fan of it being 'hardware agnostic'.

[Tbone]

The Glyph has been around for a while. It currently isn't a virtual reality device, but more of a virtual monitor/media viewer. It displays a very small, yet high resolution, image into the retina. It is not currently applicable to VR.

That sounds like what you said about Sony's 'media viewer', lol.

That's because they are very similar. Avegant is better as it is a sharper quality. Here's what you need to look at:

WXGA (1280 x 720) per eye resolution
45° horizontal field of view

90 degress is the bare minimum for convincing VR. 45 degrees is just a small floating screen. Avegant produces a nice, sharp one, but it is not a VR headset yet. True Player Gear is vapor wear until we see more than a rendering. Know that Oculus has the best minds in the world working on the Rift. As far as I know, the only true people in the VR space so far is the Oculus Rift and the Sony Project Morpheus.