Tilt Five – Bring holograms home – Play your favorite games in 3D
tiltfive.com
tiltfive.com
Also some really bad UX stuff - you have to have the glasses plugged into an Android phone or Windows PC. I have a Windows laptop, but the cord to plug in was so short I almost pulled it off the table a couple of times. I Googled, and that was a pretty common complaint that came up, which is just such a silly thing to get wrong.
The controls also weren't that good - when pointing sometimes it'd just lose track of my controller. I tried with a few games and never had a particularly good experience.
Overall, this was one of those things where the marketing made it feel like I should expect a magical experience, and the reality was very disappointing. Thankfully, they have a return policy - it's buried in their site and confusingly worded, but I was able to ship the thing back to them and get a refund.
You don't by any chance have an undiagnosed stereoblindness do you? The promo videos make it look like extremely classic fiducial marker positioning of 3D models. The rest is up to your eyes and brain to be able to see depth from stereo.
Have you been to a 3D movie? If so did it feel like 3D to you?
The only scenarios that make sense from your description of it looking the same as a computer monitor are that either you got a broken one or you personally cannot see depth from stereo. I want to add that brains are very good at hiding this. If you've never used VR or been to a 3D film, its entirely possible that you could be stereoblind and just don't know.
1) The cable is indeed too short. And when I got mine, they didn't have Android support at all. You were expected to have a full PC for every user. That was not clear at all at any point through the Kickstarter or the subsequent marketing they did, showing people playing games together. I could see having people plug devices into phones in that scenario, but dragging out their own gaming laptop for a game of "D&D with animations" is absurd.
2) The display resolution is actually pretty low. While the solidity of the graphics and FOV are both a bit better than, say, the HoloLens 1/2 or Magic Leap 1 with their janky waveguide displays, the degrees per pixel is relatively high, making the images kind of blurry and pixelated. This also means that there is a limit to the distance at which it can resolve stereo differences significant enough to be visible.
3) Their concept of placing the retroreflector pad on a table is just wrong. It's intended that way to allow multiple people to play around the pad on top of a table. But that biases your view of the pad, giving you a narrow frustum to look through. There's also the fact that the graphics don't "pop" above the pad like they show in all their promotional material (though I know enough to have not expected it, it's still disappointing to see them make those misrepresentations). The device is actually much better if you mount the pad on a wall. Then you have full view of it.
4) Points 2 and 3 above combine to make a graphics miserably hard to read. The display resolution is independent of the size of, orientation of, and distance to the pad, which is good. But your displayable area is limited by both the pad and the display. You can only see graphics in the Venn AND diagram of those two. Which can often be a very narrow area. If there's any text or small details on the graphics, they get very, very hard to read.
And that's just the display. I could go on at length about how awful the controllers are. They may be the worst controllers I've ever used. I'll just leave it at that.
Jeri Ellsworth was kind of a hero of mine, post-college, discovering my own hacker-ness. I still follow her on Twitter and appreciate her take on a lot of things, but it's definitely disappointing to see how much she pushes this device that is really substandard in a lot of ways.
This was a tough call. Originally we shot 100% of the CastAR video through the glasses and it worked great, but didn't really explain the 3D "pop". So in our second pitch video we sometimes allowed a small amount of synthetic image beyond the edge of the display which gave people a better clue as to the 3D nature of the image, but also for some people did overpromise. Because of that I always look for this in T5 videos and in general I think they don't drift any or only a little, but it's not like I have seen them all. Also note that the T5 board can tilt up at the end (don't know if this is released) so you actually can look above the tabletop and see things, though again, I don't know if this has been demoed in any videos (I'm sure it's been demoed at some conferences).
Deciding to compose the image rather than shoot through the glasses can also be misleading, but for various technical reasons shooting through the glasses is also negatively misleading because the camera and the eye don't work the same (among other things the image is brighter in your eye). There's no perfect answer, but I think Jer and the rest of the team do want to get this right.
At the end of the day it's an arcade and tabletop game system, not a AAA gaming rig, and doesn't try to be the latter. Perhaps they should make that more clear. I actually plan to use it in my current work for looking at CFD* video as a group (each of us with a headset) because we can walk around the table, lean in, and point things out to each other.
I also like to put the game board on the wall BTW!
* computational fluid dynamics -- analyzing plume performance in the atmosphere
Maybe it’s just the circles I run with, but I think it would actually be pretty unlikely to select a group of (say) three friends chosen at random and have each of them have use daily a Windows laptop or an Android device.
For instance I have my gaming desktop and work laptop (both Windows), but I doubt I can install the software on the laptop and I’m not running a cable from the desktop. And for me, 100% of family members and 90% of friends, no joy on the android device front.
So at least only one of you would need the computing end of it.
> 1) The cable is indeed too short.
Yup, fair enough. We designed the cable more around using the glasses with a mobile device, and then ended up focusing more on PC support on the software side. We have a longer cable in the works.
> And when I got mine, they didn't have Android support at all. You were expected to have a full PC for every user.
We now support plugging up to four glasses into one PC, and we have beta Android support available for devs to play with. Focusing on these was, to some degree, what delayed getting started on the longer cable, though now I wish I'd started pushing on the cable sooner. C'est la vie.
> 2) The display resolution is actually pretty low... making the images kind of blurry and pixelated
There's a few things that were probably contributing to this. For one, we've had some manufacturing issues where our projectors could become defocused during shipment or as the glasses warm up during use. We have a much better handle on this now, and if your projectors are blurry I'd encourage you to contact our customer support so we can repair or replace them.
A second issue was that our SDK shipped with some bad defaults initially that caused apps to render a larger FOV in order to cover some of the pincushion-distortion corners of our projectors at the expense of resolution in the center. This was my fault, and we've since changed the defaults. There's still more to be done in this area, with things like adaptive view frusta focusing on the gameboard.
Yet another issue, I think, was apps (including some of our demos) not applying antialiasing in the best way. There's a temptation these days to just turn on TAA at some default settings and call it a day. That works alright for high resolution rendering, but for our glasses we've found that good ol' fashion MSAA can make a big difference in how the images look.
All that's to say that I think we've improved on image sharpness in a number of ways, and we get pretty good looking images on our glasses these days. I guess I'm kind of biased, though :)
> 3) Their concept of placing the retroreflector pad on a table is just wrong.
I would say this depends a bit on the use case. We've had a lot of fun getting people around a table for stereo couch-competitive games, but I was also talking with someone yesterday about using our glasses for CAD design reviews where a vertical or tilted gameboard would probably make more sense. We've added support for custom gameboard orientations in recent drivers, mainly to get feedback from developers and adventurous users on it (it's a little user-unfriendly at the moment). It's not clear right now exactly what user-facing functionality we'll do for this, but it's something we've talked a lot about, and I appreciate the feedback.
> I could go on at length about how awful the controllers are. They may be the worst controllers I've ever used. I'll just leave it at that.
Oof :)
I'll say this... The controller design was basically taken as-is from the CastAR design, as we just didn't feel we had the time or resources to do much to its design. For a long time I was pretty down on the design, as tracking it with LEDs in a straight line is tricky since it's missing a visible degree of freedom (roll). Our initial tracking implementation left a lot to be desired, but we've since gotten full 6dof tracking to work surprisingly well. I'm actually kind of a convert when it comes to using what's effectively a barbeque lighter to interact with virtual objects. It keeps the controller from occluding a lot of the view while providing a nice physical reference for pointing or interacting with things.
As for the concept of turning the controller sideways to use as a traditional controller... I think it could still use some work.
I really wanted to love Tilt5, both because of your background and because it's not an ad-riddled megacorp backing it. And I'm an XR maximalist--VR and AR have been the focus of my career for the last 7, 8 years. But at this point, for most of the things I could do with T5, I'd have a better experience mounting a projector on my ceiling.
I just... I don't know. I don't understand why you ever released this product. It wreaks of "yet another naive startup got ripped off by a some factory in China". I saw the posts about the difficulties you all had with getting the manufacturing right. And this is a common thread from everyone I've ever talked to who off-shores manufacturing. It's just frustrating that nobody in the startup consumer electronics space seems to be paying attention to any of the other consumer electronics startups. Was it a case of hubris? "Yes, but we are special and this won't happen to us?"
On the controllers, I'd almost rather have a nose pointer and a small, hand-held clicker button. I actually have several already: they are basically Bluetooth keyboards that have a single button that sends the Enter or Space key.
I wish I had many more options for pads. They don't seem like the expensive part of the BOM. IDK, maybe I'm underestimating the cost of bonding retro reflective paint to cardboard. But it seems silly to have to choose between pad sizes while purchasing. Just give both the small and large size pads.
I got the large one and it's really too large for single-person use. I also don't have a table that fits it. My coffee table is long enough, but not wide enough. My dinner table is wide enough, but way too long. Not a lot of square tables out there.
Better yet, be able to support multiple pads at the same time and create a system for mounting pads on the wall. I could see creating a desk setup where I have the desk top and the wall behind the desk as retro reflector pads. It'd make my whole desk into a stereo tank. Get rid of my monitors completely and not be strained trying to where a tyoical VR headset all day.
I'd probably get more use out of a ridiculously large pad that I could setup against the wall in my living room than the current, awkwardly-sized pad that I basically have to use on my floor.
And I'd immediately stop putting any effort into plugging multiple devices into a single PC. It's a hack that fixes things only on paper. Where am I going to put this PC so that all the players can sit around the board and not sweep their drinks off the table or yank the cable out? Who even has a PC powerful enough to run that many independent views (2 per person!) but XR enthusiasts like me who already have other, much more capable devices?
> I wish I had many more options for pads.
Yup, we've heard this a lot, and it's definitely something we're looking to address. It is possible to lay down additional retroreflective material to get a larger viewable area. Folks in our discord can likely give you some tips if you're interested.
> I don't understand why you ever released this product. It wreaks of "yet another naive startup got ripped off by a some factory in China".
I didn't mean to imply at all that we got ripped off by a factory. Getting manufacturing right is on us. We had an issue that we didn't catch, and some people got shipped glasses that defocused. We've done our best to do right by them and repair or replace those glasses.
We released the product because we believe that despite some imperfections, doing AR like we do it is way more compelling than any other way possible today for certain use cases. We want to enable people to do cool things and enjoy this product, while we learn from how they use it so we can improve on it. I think we've improved it a lot already, and will continue to do so going forward (that was the point I was going for in my first reply).
Currently, doing XR hardware is all about trade-offs. Designing just the display system involves significant trade-offs between price, weight, brightness, field of view, vergence-accommodation conflict (eye strain / comfort), image resolution, eye box size (accommodating different face shapes & look-directions), depth of field (what range of distances are virtual objects in-focus across), latency, and power consumption just to name a few. Our trade-offs are pretty unique in the industry, and we've struggled a bit with how best to communicate about them to different audiences.
Basically, we give up the ability to draw virtual objects anywhere, relying on the retroreflector, and in exchange we get to make a pair of glasses that are light weight, bright, in focus for up-close objects, have a wide field of view up-close, don't cause eye-strain, have a large eye box, are translucent with minimal dimming of the real-world, all for a non-astronomical price. For clarity, the "up-close" qualifier for the "in focus" is a feature - most headsets are focused at infinite distance and close objects will be improperly focused. The "up-close" qualifier for the "field of view" is a limitation of the gameboard, assuming additional retroreflector isn't added.
On top of that, afaik, we're the only company looking to enable local multiplayer experiences for AR. There's something pretty special about interacting face-to-face with other people that are seeing the same things-that-aren't-there as you. It helps with the suspension of disbelieve in sort of a unique way. I know you said that we should give up on this so we don't catch everyone's computers on fire, but 4 pairs of our glasses have fewer pixels than a 4K display, and because we do the 180 Hz image stabilization on the headset, the PC only needs to hit 60 fps for smooth animations. We tend not to be entirely pixel-limited in the rendering, but as we optimize more that's the limit we'll approach.
Anyhoo, hopefully that wasn't too infomercial-ish, but that's some semblance of what excited me about this when I first met Jeri all those years ago, and it's what still excites me (and I think everyone at Tilt Five) about it today. And that, ultimately, is why we made the product.
Maybe that's the sort of answer you were looking for? Feel free to tell me I'm completely off-base ;)
I guess I'm not quite being accurate when I say it was exactly like stuff in 3D on my monitor - it did sort of look like things were 3D, but meaningfully less than what I expected. Honestly, I'm having a hard time describing it accurately, but suffice to say it was extremely underwhelming.
I get that Tilt5 is taking a different approach and has a reason for it - I’m just not sure that approach is actually good enough in practice. I’ve only used it for the simple demos at the show, but I remember thinking the resolution looked like it might be a limitation for doing more complex games too. Most of the board games I enjoy the most but which are complex enough I’d want a digital alternative involve lots of cards with small text on them.
We err on the side of comfortable but "flatter" for our default setting and for trade shows and conventions, but adjusting the setting to be appropriate for your face is just a slider in our control panel. We also have a calibration app in our latest public beta drivers for people to find their IPD if they don't know it.
I hadn't heard people complaining about this at trade shows before, but it makes a lot of sense. We should probably incorporate a quick calibration at the start of our demos. Thanks for the feedback!
Our company started building AR software around the time of the Tilt5 kickstarter and seeing your team’s efforts was really inspirational to us. Congrats on all your success so far, I look forward to giving it another try…and calibrating my eyeballs first.
In my experience I got a good 3D effect for objects that were right in the center but the moment things got close to the edge the illusion broke. At times it did look a bit like 3D content on a 2D screen.
Objects near the edge of the retroreflective area disappear when you would normally expect them to appear ‘above’ the mat. They somewhat get around this by presenting most information below the surface. Apps like board games were the worst for it because they typically use the whole mat and they typically appear on or above the surface. Anything above the surface just gets cut off around the edge. The larger board that can be tilted up at the back helped but only from one angle.
I agree that the controls (a wand?) didn't feel so natural.
I saw videos and followed the project a bit before finally trying it in person, so I felt let down a little.
Rather than adjusting it for each person we gave the demo to, we set the IPD a bit low so that it'd be comfortable for everyone, but people with a larger physical IPD wouldn't perceive as much depth.
Sorry you felt let down by it.
Also, I was shocked at the pricing. This is 2-3x what I would have expected. Not saying it isn’t worth it, but even as someone very much inclined to waste money on shiny electronics, the value proposition here seems extremely questionable.
I was about to add that one thing the marketing videos don't show is that every pair of glasses needs to be connected to its own dedicated PC. So if you had five people sitting around a board game, there would be five PC's required as well. Glad I checked first. That used to be the case but it looks like they have addressed that recently. Nice!
> With our 1.3 driver update one Windows10 PC can support multiple Tilt Five Glasses. Depending on how many USB-C and USB-A ports you have on your PC, you may need a powered hub to provide enough power and data bandwidth to run more than two Tilt Five Glasses.
https://docs.tiltfive.com/t5_release_notes_19ii.html
We can't promise to prioritize issues found in it, but we do use Linux for a lot of our internal development. We're targeting Ubuntu, but I don't think there's anything that would preclude getting it working on another distro.
However I see two issues there, number one is pricing. It's unclear to me how much the games themselves would cost and this headset is already relatively expensive particularly since it's marketed as a group activity - just three players already runs you $1000. That's a lot of money to drop on a VR related device that has significantly more limited applications as opposed to a more generalized system such as the upcoming Apple vision, and the oculus.
And number two is that you have to use a wand to manipulate the board and the pieces, and I question how accurate this will be if there are literally hundreds of pieces on the board. I could see it becoming extremely frustrating very quickly. And I'll be honest, and this is not the fault of tiltfive but I really like the weight of a pewter figurine in my hand and the lack of any haptic feedback might bother me.
This is true, but that doesn't mean there's no market for it. I'm not interested in Apple Vision, Oculus, or similar because I'm not interested in tying myself to those ecosystems.
I could be interested in something like this, though. Maybe not for playing tabletop games so much, but it would be fun to explore other uses.
I can't discount the Tilt entirely, I have never tried it, but to me it looks like one is a novelty for a niche purpose, and the other is becoming a general computing interface.
I assume so, but honestly, my interest in VR/AR is limited enough that I haven't bothered to really research what's available on the market. So I only know of the big names, and Tilt.
> it looks like one is a novelty for a niche purpose
That's actually why I find Tilt to be more interesting than the rest!
I thought the IP was stuck in some kind of bankruptcy court hell.
The price seems to have increased dramatically.
We did ship a few early headsets to people who paid extra for "earliest access" -- one of them even did a teardown video!
This wasnt the case! I was a backer and the actual email sent stated:
"we’ve decided to give everyone who was expecting castAR hardware a free pair of consumer castAR at release and will be fully reimbursing your Kickstarter backings if you follow the process we describe in a FAQ. You believed in us, so you get a castAR for free once the consumer product is released."
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/technicalillusions/cast...
You never gave an option to wait, never sent the "free" device, and (most annoyingly) didnt even inform castAR backers about the tilt5 kickstarter, so this is the first time I have heared about it!
I appreciate castAR went bankrupt (and that you reimbursed backers beforehand - a most honorable thing to do in the kickstarter world), so not expecting tilt5 to honour the free device, just clarifying your confusion over what was actually stated :)
p.s. what was the gift you sent out with the refund? I never got one as IIRC I would have had to pay for shipping to EU.
That’s right, I had forgotten that Christina pointed out that tracking it was harder than just returning the money. But the two 10K backers part was right, which must have fuzzed my brain.
I cough won’t comment on decisions made after I left that led to the bankruptcy.
I remember there was discussions around people setting up retroreflective walls with the markers - is that possible with the software yet? Feels like that would give some pretty effective cameraless AR for specific use cases
But they also said they wouldn't hesitate to kickstart with Jeri again (because of the refunds) and none of them had heard about TiltFive.
There's games like Big Trouble in Little China that are a blast to play, but require quite a bit of setup, maneuvering minis around, managing mini character-sheets, etc. If Tilt5 could automate most of that, it would be fantastic. Essentially, let it push the miniatures around for me, to the right places, and without me having to purchase and store the enormous box containing all of the gear. I'm sure Tilt5 takes up a fair bit of space, but so do 10 games of the same complexity as BTiLC!
Not to mention the many great games that were only ever sold as a limited release, have gone out of print, etc.
Is this actually possible with Tilt5 today? I'm guessing licensing issues would make it a challenge. TableTop Simulator seems to get around licensing by essentially being a big sandbox the community can create anything for, but the application itself is so heavy and complex it's not very fun in practice (IMO, for our group).
I'd have less than zero interest in playing tabletop games if everyone at the table were wearing headsets of any sort. We might as well just play online.
From watching the video, even with those headsets on, if Jim on the other side of the table is being the dick he is, I can still throw my beer at him. Which maybe isn't the most social thing there is, but he's always hogging the health packs.
The active attention barrier sitting between people in a social setting doesn't bother you, and that's fine. It bothers me and that's fine, too. It just means that this sort of product isn't my thing. It doesn't mean that this is a bad product nobody should use or something.
Really, though—isn’t this sort of like the Tiger electronics handheld to the Gameboy?
Those things were kinda fun, and definitely cheap, but the writing was on the wall.
Demeo is getting mixed AR too https://www.resolutiongames.com/demeo
Tiny projectors can already be had for inside $5 [1], cameras under $3 [2] - and since the game board is retroreflective, you don't need any substantial brightness.
Someone using all noname parts can probably get this to market for under $40.
"The drive current is unknown"
"The owner didn't know how to test"
I get your point but I'm not sure I have any confidence in that example.
Which one of these are supposed to be my favorite?
I think this is the hole that sinks the ship. Catan at least is relatable, but am I going to play Catan with this instead of cardboard?
That said, I can see how something like this could be pretty cool. Instead of playing Up-Front and imagining that the terrain cards are now serving different purposes (like desert or jungle terrain), it would just look correct. Of course that says nothing about why 3D is necessary....
My main complaint thus far is that I shelled out a lot of extra dough for the package that included THREE HEADSETS! Whoa! THREE headsets that you can plug in locally, so you can enjoy it with friends! But then very few, if any, apps for TIlt Five supported local AR multiplayer. Maybe that has changed in the past month or so. I need to dive back in to it. I think it's an expensive novelty that will have an interesting place in the museum of XR development.
It appears that they have two boards: a flat board where the images are limited to the reflective area, and a bent board (which has a flap that lifts up at an angle) so that you can get an actual 3d visual...for 3 out of 4 players (the image is still limited to the reflective area, but the reflective area is now 3d instead of just a flat plane).
I suppose there's a chance that something that is within the confines of the play mat from the player's perspective could appear outside of it to a theoretical outside observer, so they made their marketing reels have stuff appearing outside of the retroreflective mat.
Is it me, or is the list of games available shorter than it was last year?