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

Saad Sahawneh
Jan 22 · 7 min read

“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 designed the circuitry for the Commodore Direct-to-TV, using a single-chip implementation of the Commodore 64 computer, which fit 30 games into a joystick. 70,000 units were sold on the first day.
“I Really Do Know How To Build Race Cars — Don’t Make Me Pull Out the Trophies,” from Jeri’s “Race Car Fabrication” playlist on her YouTube channel.
Jeri at her “Computers Made Easy” store in Oregon. She eventually owned 5 stores in small towns, which she would later sell, and return to her love for hobbyist electronics.
Jeri announces the launch of Tilt Five’s Kickstarter campaign in September 2019, on her YouTube channel.
Tilt Five is a holographic tabletop game platform that comes with augmented reality glasses, a board and wands that meld the physical and virtual worlds, and is available for pre-order.

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

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Data Driven Investor

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