In case you missed it last week, AR startup Tilt 5 raised $7.5 million in venture funding, a hopeful sign amid a rather bearish market for AR/VR startups. I've been following the underlying technology for Tilt 5's headset since it was spun out of Valve under the name Cast AR seven years ago. Founded by CEO Jeri Ellsworth, one reason her startup won backers is likely her focused approach to augmented reality -- not attempting to make it the Next Great Platform For Everything, but starting first with a very specific use case. As she put it to me last year:
[Her] 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...
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.
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