VRVana, developers of the Totem virtual reality headset, have announced they’ve pulled their Kickstarter campaign in favour of a pre-order system for interested VR enthusiasts.
About – turn!
Kickstarter campaigns are tough and far from all are successful. VRVana’s campaign which had begun a couple of weeks ago was doing better than most. With a lofty target of $350k CAD however it was an ambitious goal and, at their current total of $181,643 the company has announced it’s to cancel the campaign in favour of a new approach.
We received an impressive number of responses to last week’s survey, thank you to everyone who took the time to participate. We really appreciated your kind words and encouragement!
Based on the comments and feedback, we’ve made the decision to pull our Kickstarter campaign and offer pre-ordering directly through our website.
See Also: Totem VR Headset Kickstarter is Live, In-depth Interview with Vrvana CEO Bert Nepveu
So why now? The company cites some rethinking of how they approach getting the new VR headset, which sports onboard hardware acceleration for pre-warping headset images and was to sport a 1080p low persistence OLED display. Their reasons?
We didn’t get the traction we had anticipated on Kickstarter for a number of reasons:
1. Most Kickstarter supporters are VR enthusiasts who would prefer a polished consumer headset instead of a developer kit.
2. Because some key features are still in development, some supporters wanted to hold off on purchasing.
3. The price was perceived to be a bit high considering that we could not show all the features. We can’t wait to show you our new OLED screens when we receive them ;-)
So, instead we decided to go back to the drawing board to focus our efforts on developing the consumer version of Totem.
So if you were a backer or, for some reason elements of the Kickstarter campaign had put you off but were otherwise interested, you can head over to their pre-order page here to grab a spot in the queue for a unit. Placing a pre-order will set you back $50 for the initial deposit with the full unit cost running $450 not including any shipping, tax / duties incurred at shipping. The first 1000 units are estimated to reach customers around October 2015.
It’s certainly a bold move on the company’s part, it’ll be interesting to see how existing backers and the community at large react to the news. Were you a backer? Or had you held off due to the nature of the campaign? Let us know in the comments below.
