Vrvana

Vrvana
Information
Industry	Virtual reality, mixed reality
Founded	2005 or 2006
Founder	Bertrand Nepveu and partners
Headquarters	Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Notable Personnel	Bertrand Nepveu (CEO)
Products	Totem (unreleased mixed reality headset)
Parent	Apple (from 2017)

Vrvana (Vrvana Inc., originally True Player Gear) was a Montreal company that developed the Totem, a tethered head-mounted display that used a pair of front cameras to show the wearer's surroundings on its internal OLED display and could switch between augmented reality and virtual reality. The company tried to crowdfund a developer kit on Kickstarter in 2014, cancelled the campaign, and later sold a small pre-production run of Totem units to enterprise customers.

In November 2017, TechCrunch reported that Apple had acquired Vrvana for around 30 million US dollars, citing two sources. Apple declined to comment but did not deny the report, and the Totem never shipped as a commercial product. Patent records later list Apple as the assignee of Vrvana's headset patents. Founder Bertrand Nepveu went on to work on the team that built the Apple Vision Pro.

Reviewed 15 October 2026. Every claim, date, figure, quote and patent record checked against the cited TechCrunch, Tom's Hardware, Road to VR, PocketGamer.biz, Tech Xplore, Ubergizmo, Crowdfund Insider, BetaKit, AWE, MobileSyrup, Razer and Google Patents pages. About review dates.

History

True Player Gear

Sources give slightly different founding years. TechCrunch and Nepveu's speaker biography for Augmented World Expo 2024 give 2005; the biography says he started the company to play his favorite Xbox games in virtual reality. Tom's Hardware reported in 2016 that Nepveu and four partners had founded the company in 2006 with some of his family's money, and that investments from family and friends kept it going for years.

The company was first known as True Player Gear. A patent application that Nepveu filed in March 2011 for a headset with a built-in image processor was assigned to True Player Gear Inc. in 2013 and to Vrvana Inc. in 2017. In March 2014, still under the True Player Gear name, the company showed computer renders of a headset with a 1080p OLED display, a 90-degree field of view and two 1080p cameras that could be used for augmented reality. Ubergizmo reported at the time that the company had first shown its technology at E3 2006. By September 2014 the company had been renamed Vrvana and the product was called the Totem.

Kickstarter campaign (2014)

Vrvana launched a Kickstarter campaign for a Totem developer kit on 16 September 2014, with a goal of 350,000 Canadian dollars over 28 days. Reward tiers for a developer headset ran from 400 to 500 US dollars, with shipping limited to North America and the European Union. Tech Xplore reported that the team included four cofounders, among them COO Marc Olivier Lepage, with Bertrand Nepveu as CEO, and gave an estimated delivery of April 2015 for the developer kit.

The campaign passed 100,000 Canadian dollars in its first day (Road to VR counted 105,000). By 30 September it had reached nearly 154,000 dollars from about 425 backers. Vrvana cancelled the campaign in October 2014 with about 180,000 Canadian dollars pledged. In an email to backers, the team said that "most Kickstarter supporters are VR enthusiasts who would prefer a polished consumer headset instead of a developer kit", and that the price "was perceived to be a bit high considering that we could not show all the features," and that it would focus on developing a consumer version of the Totem instead. Backers could convert their pledges into pre-orders on Vrvana's website, where a 50 dollar deposit reserved a place in an initial run of 1,000 units, with first deliveries expected in October 2015.

Enterprise pivot (2016)

After the cancellation, Vrvana kept working without public announcements. In February 2016 it showed a fifth-generation Totem prototype at the Unity Vision Summit; COO Lepage told Tom's Hardware that the company had been on its fourth prototype when the Kickstarter launched and that a sixth was in development. He said Vrvana planned to sell the Totem directly to enterprise customers in small volumes, had talked with customers in the automotive and simulation industries, and was raising a Series A round of 10 million dollars.

After trying the Totem at the Immersed 2016 event in October 2016, Tom's Hardware reported that Vrvana's total funding was a little less than 2 million dollars. Vrvana had already sold its pre-production run of 50 Totem units, priced at 5,000 dollars each, with the first units going to automotive, simulation and amusement park clients. Nepveu said that if the initial run went well, the company would finalize tooling and begin production in the first quarter of 2017. Nepveu said a consumer price of 400 to 500 dollars would only be possible with production in the millions, and that the company was considering licensing the design to an established hardware maker under "powered by Vrvana" branding.

CES 2017

Vrvana gave private demonstrations of the Totem at CES 2017 rather than exhibiting at a booth. Tom's Hardware named the Totem its Best In Show for the event, saying it was by far the device that felt the most complete and most advanced among the XR products it had seen there, while noting that it lacked eye tracking and still had to be tethered to a PC. In a 2024 interview with BetaKit, Nepveu said Apple first contacted Vrvana in 2016 and that he demonstrated the Totem to Jony Ive at CES 2017.

Acquisition by Apple

On 21 November 2017, TechCrunch reported that Apple had acquired Vrvana for around 30 million US dollars, according to two sources. Apple declined to comment but did not deny the story, and Vrvana did not respond. Several Vrvana employees had joined Apple in California, and the company's website and social accounts had stopped posting news in August 2017. According to TechCrunch, Vrvana had raised less than 2 million dollars, with Real Ventures, the Canadian Technology Accelerator and angel investor Richard Adler listed as investors on PitchBook. Other outlets, including MobileSyrup, relied on TechCrunch's report for the deal.

U.S. patent records show Vrvana's inside-out tracking patent family assigned to Apple Inc. in July 2018, and Nepveu's 2011 headset patent assigned to Apple in July 2020. TechCrunch placed the deal alongside Apple's earlier AR- and VR-related acquisitions, including the eye-tracking company SMI in June 2017 and Metaio.

Totem headset

The Totem was a tethered headset with two front cameras, one per eye, that fed stereo video of the room to the internal display. The cameras were also used for inside-out tracking, so the headset did not need external sensors. Because the virtual imagery was drawn on a screen rather than projected onto a transparent lens, Lepage said it could be opaque, and Tom's Hardware noted that the augmented view had the same wide field of view as the virtual one, unlike the Microsoft HoloLens. TechCrunch described the Totem as an "extended reality" device with 6DoF positional tracking and infrared hand tracking, and reported that Nepveu had said in a 2017 talk that working prototypes had brought the delay between the cameras and the display down to 3 milliseconds. In 2024, Nepveu told BetaKit that the Totem had been optimized to 12 milliseconds of latency and that a prototype made with Samsung shortly before the acquisition reached three milliseconds.

Part of the processing ran on the headset. In 2014, Nepveu said the Totem applied lens pre-distortion and chromatic aberration correction in its own hardware instead of on the host computer, to reduce the load on the PC's graphics card. In 2016, Lepage said the headset used a third-party FPGA, ran embedded Linux, and processed camera tracking data locally while the PC rendered the application. He said the optics and electronics were designed in house, with one cofounder bringing 15 years of experience in the camera industry.

In the October 2016 demonstration, the headset recognized printed QR-code markers and placed 3D models on them, and Nepveu switched the view from augmented reality to full VR with a key press. Vrvana offered plugins for Unity and Unreal Engine, listed OpenVR and SteamVR compatibility, and was taking part in the second round of Lighthouse certification so that the production model could also use base-station tracking.

Specification	2014 Kickstarter target specifications	2016 pre-production model
Display	1080p low-persistence RGB stripe OLED	Single 1440p QHD OLED, 1280 x 1440 per eye, 75 Hz in low persistence (90 Hz possible)
Field of view	90 degrees	120 degrees
Optics	Per-eye focus adjustment from -7 to +3 diopters	Fresnel and aspherical compound lens; IPD 55-72 mm
Cameras	Two 1080p cameras	Two 1440p 75 Hz RGB pass-through cameras; two 720p 60 Hz infrared mono tracking cameras
Inertial sensors	1 kHz gyroscope, 4 kHz accelerometer, magnetometer	1 kHz gyroscope, 6 kHz accelerometer, 100 Hz magnetometer
Connection	HDMI input, USB output	Single cable with DisplayPort 1.2a, USB 3.0 and power
Audio	Two 3.5 mm jacks	3.5 mm jack, one user microphone, two environment microphones
Wireless	Not listed	Bluetooth 4.1, Wi-Fi 802.11n
Price	400 to 500 US dollars (Kickstarter developer kit tiers)	5,000 dollars (pre-production units)

The 2014 design accepted side-by-side 3D video from any HDMI source, and Vrvana listed PC, PlayStation 3 and 4, and Xbox 360 and One as supported platforms. The 2016 model added three infrared illuminators on each side of the cameras, and Nepveu said the pre-production version would include a front "speckle pattern" laser to help measure depth.

Industry partnerships

Vrvana was one of the supporters listed when Razer and Sensics announced the OSVR open platform at CES 2015. Razer's announcement said OSVR was designed to support all VR devices, "including the Oculus DK 2 and Vrvana's Totem headset." TechCrunch reported that Vrvana had worked with Valve, Tesla and Audi under non-disclosure agreements.

Patents

Patent	Title	Filed	Inventors	Later assignment
US 9,625,721 B2	Method, digital image processor and video display system for digitally processing a video signal	18 March 2011 (granted 18 April 2017)	Bertrand Nepveu	True Player Gear Inc. (2013), Vrvana Inc. (2017), Apple Inc. (2020)
WO 2017/139871 A1	Head-mounted display for virtual and mixed reality with inside-out positional, user body and environment tracking	20 February 2017 (priority 18 February 2016)	Simon Fortin-Deschênes, Vincent Chapdelaine-Couture, Yan Côté, Anthony Ghannoum	U.S. patents 10,838,206 (granted 17 November 2020) and 12,169,276 (granted 17 December 2024) in the same family are assigned to Apple Inc.
WO 2017/161437 A1	Optical arrangements including fresnel lens elements	21 March 2017	Ian Powell, Simon Fortin-Deschênes	Filed by Vrvana Inc.

The 2017 tracking application describes a headset that combines computer vision with data from several sensors for inside-out positional, body and environment tracking, and that does part of the processing on the headset itself to reach a high frame rate and low latency.

After the acquisition

Nepveu told BetaKit that after the acquisition he joined the team developing the Vision Pro under Mike Rockwell, and that the Totem's low-latency FPGA integration and its "reality knob" for moving between AR and VR stood out to Apple. In a February 2024 Road to VR summary of his interview on the Voices of VR podcast, Nepveu said he had worked mainly on "point-of-view correction" for the passthrough view at Apple and had left the company before the Vision Pro launched. Road to VR described Vrvana's physical control for moving between immersive VR and passthrough AR and wrote that the "reality dial" feature became an integral part of the Vision Pro. His AWE biography says he spent almost three years on the project before returning to Montreal and co-founding the venture firm Triptyq Capital. These accounts of Vrvana's influence on the Vision Pro come from Nepveu and the press; Apple declined to comment when the acquisition was reported.

See also

• Apple Vision Pro
• Video passthrough
• Mixed reality
• OSVR