Update, September 30: A week after launching its Kickstarter, Tilt Five has already raised nearly double its fundraising target.
Tilt Five: Holographic Tabletop Gaming is a new Kickstarter that is, on the face of it, an augmented reality-based gaming system. But as Tilt Five co-founder, CEO, and renowned hacker Jeri Ellsworth suggested to me last week, it’s also a new vision for augmented reality that runs totally counter to the “boil the ocean” approach (as she puts it) currently being taken by Microsoft, Magic Leap, and other major AR/VR players. (Including, presumably, Apple.)
Rather than create an AR headset for a wide variety of use cases, Tilt Five’s vision is first to start with a specific target market for augmented reality:
“Our focus to take what you love about video games and board games and marry them together,” as she put it to me. (Tabletop gaming is a $7 billion market, she notes, while videogames are 100x that number.) So Tilt Five’s AR experience is tightly integrated with its game board, and integrates well with many existing tabletop gaming systems -- including Fantasy Grounds, which holds the license to miniatures for Dungeons & Dragons and other major franchises.
Her company's HMD has a wider field of view than any other AR glasses on the market (110 degrees, versus, say, Magic Leaps’s maximum 50 degrees), and unlike other AR headsets, can do full object occlusion, in which virtual objects seem to block out real objects behind them. She says Tilt Five can also maintain focus at variable distances, i.e. you can lean back or move forward, and the virtual objects will remain clear -- another thing other AR headsets can't accomplish.
Tilt Five is based on technology that Jeri first developed when she was at Valve Software*. (She negotiated to keep the IP rights amidst a layoff.) It was also at Valve where she had a view of the future in which AR/VR would dominate. But it was then, she tells me, that she also saw how long it would take for the industry and mainstream consumers to catch up to that future.
So Tilt Five is her vision for augmented reality that’s immediately appealing to an existing market right now: a social gaming system that can be played with friends around the same board, or with two or more boards around the world, connected online. But that’s just the start:
As hardware capacity improves, she envisions future updates of Tilt Five that will move into other use cases beyond table top gaming — for instance, 3D prototype imaging, and architecture. In other words, first get the tabletop gaming experience right, build an audience for it, improve on the technology, expand the AR experience into a bigger space, and then start thinking about AR headsets that can be taken out of the house and into the wider world.
In the short term, however, while other AR devices attempt to be broader platforms, and contend with bulky headsets that don’t work well in outside social settings (as opposed to hanging out with friends who are also wearing HMDs), Tilt 5 will be focused first on getting AR for table top gaming right.
“From our perspective we’re not going have any competition [in the near future],” Jeri Ellsworth tells me.
* Ellsworth's technology was initially launched as a company called CastAR, but after a disagreement with the startup investors, she tells me, she and the other team members pooled their money to buy back the IP and re-launch as Tilt 5 with her in charge.
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