Sep 26, 2019
After Six Years Of Development, TiltFive Launches AR Gaming Goggles
For the better part of the last decade, Jeri Ellsworth has been hard at work designing one of the most beautiful examples of Augmented Reality (AR) we’ve ever seen. Now, finally, it’s launching on Kickstarter.
The Tilt Five are a pair of AR glasses meant to turn tabletop gaming into a virtual, 3D world filled with orcs, dungeons, treasure chests, and bottomless pits. All of this happens in a small pair of goggles that makes the virtual world come to life. Sure, it’s tabletop gaming and probably not that interesting to anyone who doesn’t know what Dungeons & Dragons is, but this is the killer app for AR. It’s also been a long, long development journey.
These goggles began their life at Valve, where CEO Gabe Newell had given Jeri the task of bringing people back to tabletop gaming. With this directive, Jeri turned to turning a table into a retroreflective surface, and with software help from Rick Johnson, the prototypes for the castAR platform were born. Valve decided that VR and not AR was the future, and the entire AR team was let go, but Jeri and Rick were able to acquire the technology from Valve and spun everything off into a company called castAR.
CastAR went on to launch a remarkably successful Kickstarter, netting over one Million dollars. CastAR eventually shut its doors, citing an inability to raise a series B. That said, they did refund all of the Kickstarter pledges and send out some consumer versions of the goggles. Good on them.
For six years Jeri has been hard at work. CastAR was dissolved, but the passion was still there. Now is the time, and Tilt Five is ready for a launch. In the lead-up to the launch, Jeri posted a great tear-down into the retro-reflective holographic system she’s designed:
The key of the system, besides putting two projectors in a pair of freakin’ glasses, is the retroreflective material the play surface is made out of. For the Tilt Five system, everyone gathers around a table covered with a game board. This game board is covered in a retroreflective surface, meaning light bounces back to it’s source. For ambient light, that means the table reflects light back to the window, or a light bulb. For the projectors mounted in the goggles, that means the light is projected back into the user’s eyes.
This means everyone can gather around a table and look at the action happening on the play field, each with their own unique perspective. It’s something that’s never been done before, and yes, tabletop gaming is the killer app.
Everything we’ve seen from Tilt Five and castAR tells us that it works. I tried it five years ago, and it’s still unlike anything I’ve experienced since. This is going to be a big Kickstarter campaign, and we can easily see the Tilt Five campaign leapfrogging over the castAR campaign several times.
But this is a product that’s all about the journey, and it’s been a very long journey to get these into the hands of consumers.
