The Modern-Day Steve Wozniak Reinvents Board Games With Her New AR Company, Tilt Five.

“I also compare Jeri Ellsworth to Chuck Thacker — the main hardware designer at Xerox PARC (who was also very good with software) — in that she can really deal with the fundamentals of computing technology, architecture, related sciences, and design.” — Alan Kay
Early in our conversations, Croquet CEO David A. Smith had suggested that I talk to Jeri Ellsworth, who was doing some of the most interesting work in spatial computing with her latest venture Tilt Five, a holographic tabletop game platform and that comes with augmented reality glasses, a board, and wands that meld the physical and virtual worlds. She was one of David’s favorite people in the world, and — for the short time that I had known him — David was one of my favorite people in the world. That would make Jeri, by association, also one of my favorite people in the world. I wrote to Jeri, and we had a call. I had wanted to write about her story earlier, but I needed to learn more and let the ideas marinate.
Jeri’s work had been extensively covered for a long time. The New York Times had published a story in 2004 titled A Toy With a Story about Jeri’s achievement of fitting the entire circuitry of a two-decade-old Commodore 64 home computer onto a single chip, in a joystick with 30 built-in games. The joystick connected to a TV was named the Commodore C64 Direct-to-TV, and its instant success thrust Jeri into the spotlight. In a more recent 2019 story titled Always Building, From the Garage to Her Company, as part of The New York Times’ Visionary series, Jeri was once again thrust into the spotlight, this time for her latest brainchild, Tilt Five.
The final nudge to write my story would come after hearing one of Jeri’s latest mentions in the AR Insider interview XR Talks: Notes From an AR Legend with Avi Bar-Zeev, one of Croquet’s advisors (along with Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls), and an unofficial advisor to Jeri. Avi had co-founded the company behind Google Earth and he helped found and invent HoloLens at Microsoft. It sounded like Jeri was also one of Avi’s favorite people in the world, so I rushed back to writing my story, hoping that it would finally come together.

In high school, Jeri would start her first business, when she designed, built, raced and sold dirt-track race cars with her father, and made enough money to drop out and pursue the venture full-time. It was a viable progression for someone who had spent her younger years disassembling things, including the Commodore 64 that her father had brought home for her brother. Little did Jeri know at the time, that her self-taught programming skills and car-building skills would serve her well for decades to come.
In 1995, at 21, Jeri opened a chain of 5 computer stores in Oregon, later selling the business before going to college, where she couldn’t find like-minded thinkers and dropped out after only a year. She switched into high gear and rushed to Silicon Valley to pursue her dreams of building electronic devices.

For the next 20 years, Jeri fine-tuned her chip design skills. In 2000, her presence at a Commodore expo caught the attention of Mammoth Toys, and she worked with them to design the Commodore C64 Direct-to-TV joystick. Later she would become the lead architect for the chip design of TiVO, and was then hired by the video game developer Valve after the company discovered her YouTube channel. While working at Valve, Jeri launched a research and development department with a mission to build products that gathered families into their living rooms to play games. There, she also met David A. Smith when he visited Valve to demo some technology he was working on. She would later meet him again at an event, and a friendship was born. All along her journey working at these companies, however, Jeri was stuck in a paradigm of big corporation design and production constraints.
In 2013, Jeri founded castAR with a colleague she had worked with at Valve, and after leaving, they bought the technology they had developed while at the company so that they could build augmented and virtual reality glasses. After growing to 70 employees, the company shut down in 2017, and Jeri was on to her next venture, Tilt Five, using technology she acquired from castAR.
Tilt Five was launched on Kickstarter to great success in September 2019, raising $1,767,301 in 35 days, and propelling Jeri into the next phase of her journey. This time, she would design and build a product that was easy to understand, easy to use, and fun for the family to play in their living room. By focusing on tabletop AR games, Tilt Five was able to create high-quality experiences that were perfect for consumers. It was affordable too, starting at $299.99, and included several games and access to the SDK that lets developers build their own games. It also had mass-market appeal, as Avi said in his AR Insider interview: “I wanna see that thing at Best Buy. I wanna see that thing be the thing that you do on a Friday night with your friends sitting around a table and play these games, and it’ll be the Monopoly a year from now.”
Jeri attributes Tilt Five’s success to the fact that they’ve limited the technology a lot. She says to me: “Instead of trying to boil the ocean like Magic Leap or Microsoft HoloLens, we focused it only on tabletop experiences, and we’ve optimized the design. Here’s a pair of the glasses, you just slip them on, flip the game board open and magic appears on your table. We’re not trying to put graphics everywhere in the world…and we’re a fraction of the cost, you can buy 5 or 6 headsets for the cost of a Magic Leap headset.”
Traditional gaming was broken. Players played on separate computers and communicated through headsets without physically interacting, and the holographic tabletop gaming experience solved that problem, by making gaming more collaborative and immersive. Tilt Five was perhaps the most successful implementation of collaborative gaming, and I wanted to know more about Jeri’s thoughts on collaborative technologies like Croquet. “The advantage of Croquet over other networking, from my perspective — what I’ve seen — is networking is always a problem with applications, that seamless connection is always broken. You’re always trying to find your friends out in the world, get connected, there’s huge latency at times, it’s kind of variable, you’ll get out of sync with what your friends are doing, and it seems like they’ve solved all the problems, which is fantastic…that’s important in the AR space, and I think that’s why Croquet is super excited about AR and our consumer-facing technology. We’re going to be able to deploy millions of units, their system can synchronize thousands, millions of people simultaneously, and so we’re pretty much the only platform on the horizon that’s going to have that kind of reach. Every other piece of technology out there in the AR space is way too expensive, way too clunky to be a mass-market product, and they have a long ways to go.”

The gaming industry was quickly changing, the AR industry was quickly changing, and Jeri was changing both industries at the same time. She was leading the gaming platform revolution, competing on par with the likes of Nintendo, PlayStation and Xbox. But gaming was only the beginning of a universe of experiences that augmented reality would make possible, in the living room, in classrooms, in offices, and anywhere else where groups of people wanted to collaborate. Jeri was heading down untravelled paths, blazing new trails in her dirt-track race car.
Thank you
Thank you, Jeri Ellsworth, for sharing the Tilt Five-story, and your vision of the future of AR. Thank you, David A. Smith, for suggesting I talk to Jeri. Thank you Avi Bar-Zeev for describing Tilt Five as the “Monopoly a year from now” and nudging me to finish writing this story.
Tilt Five
- Tilt Five Website
- Tilt Five Kickstarter Campaign
- Tilt Five on Twitter
- Tilt Five Jobs
- Jeri Ellsworth on Twitter
- Jeri Ellsworth Website
Croquet
- Croquet Website
- Croquet — A Collaboration System Architecture (David A. Smith, Alan Kay, Andreas Raab, David P. Reed, 2003)
- Croquet — A Menagerie of New User Interfaces (David A. Smith, Andreas Raab, David P. Reed, Alan Kay, 2004)
- Why AR Will Win — And Why it Matters How it Will Win (David A. Smith, 2019)
History of Computing Ideas
- Man-Computer Symbiosis (J. C. R. Licklider, 1960)
- Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework (Doug Engelbart, 1962)
- The Computer as a Communication Device (J.C.R. Licklider and Robert W. Taylor, 1968)
- Naming and Synchronization in a Decentralized Computer System (David P. Reed, 1979)
Alan Kay
Stories I’ve Written
- Queue Brings Real-Time Collaboration to eSports Video Replays, Powered by Croquet.
- Croquet, Leading the Industry in Collaborative Technology.
- Build Interactive Web-Based Presentations Using Croquet.
- Abandoning Pop Culture.
- Binge Uploading the Past.
- A Room Called Croquet.
- One Mind at a Time.
- A Few Grains of Sand.
- The Internet’s N² Problem.
- The Button on the Radio.
- Shhh…The Real Computer Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet.
- Keeping Maria Montessori Alive.
- Keeping Doug Engelbart Alive.

