Hands-On with Tilt Five Production AR Glasses!
**The Tilt 5 AR Gaming Headset: A Deep Dive into Its Technology, Features, and Future**
In the "before times," when we first looked at the technology behind *Tilt 5*, an augmented reality (AR) gaming headset invented by Jerry Ellsworth, it was clear that this project had the potential to revolutionize tabletop gaming. The creator backed the *Tilt 5* Kickstarter because of its innovative approach to bringing a new level of immersion to board games, Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), and beyond. After years of development, production units are finally shipping, and we were excited to catch up with Jerry to discuss the latest hardware advancements, demo some AR games, and learn about the journey from prototype to production.
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### **A Glimpse into the Journey: From Kickstarter to Production**
Jerry was interviewed about his experiences since the *Tilt 5* Kickstarter campaign, which was the largest ever for an AR project on Kickstarter. He shared how the global lockdown during COVID-19 impacted the manufacturing process, forcing the team to focus on creating robotic fixtures that could be shipped to their factory in China to ensure production could continue.
Despite these challenges, the software team remained busy, improving the hardware and introducing new features like reprojection technology. This innovation allows *Tilt 5* to upscale frame rates from game engines to an impressive 180 frames per second (fps), ensuring buttery-smooth animations and reducing the load on the user's computer.
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### **Hardware and Software Innovations**
One of the standout features of *Tilt 5* is its ability to handle multiple players simultaneously. The headset takes the heavy lifting off the PC, enabling even those with mid-tier gaming PCs or standard workstations with a decent GPU to enjoy seamless gameplay. Jerry emphasized that the team wanted to make the technology accessible, so they designed it to work on personal machines without requiring high-end hardware.
The software library has grown significantly since the Kickstarter, with between 50 and 60 games already available, including titles like *Tabletopia* and *Battle Map Studio*. Developers are also leveraging the *Tilt 5 SDK* to create custom experiences, with new games being added on a weekly basis. One particularly inspiring use case involved a group using the headset to develop a game for cancer patients, which could potentially help children recover faster by engaging them in playful interactions.
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### **Real-Time Editing and Spectator Mode**
The *Tilt 5 SDK* offers real-time editing, allowing developers to test and tweak their games without the need for lengthy iteration cycles. This feature is particularly useful for creating immersive AR experiences, as it enables quick adjustments to ensure everything looks and feels right in the physical space.
Another exciting feature on the horizon is the multi-headset spectator mode. This innovation allows a single-player game to be shared among multiple users, with one person controlling the experience while others spectate or participate. This could bring groups together for cooperative gameplay, even if they don't have their own gaming setups.
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### **Light Field Technology and Comfort**
The *Tilt 5* headset incorporates a unique light field technology that mimics how human eyes naturally focus on foreground and background elements. This approach makes the AR experience more comfortable by allowing users to focus without eye strain, as the glasses automatically adjust to the user's position on their face.
Jerry highlighted how this feature eliminates the need for calibration or adjustments, making it easy for anyone to slip on the headset and start playing in just 30 seconds. This "plug-and-play" functionality is a significant leap forward in AR technology, offering an unparalleled immersive experience without complexity.
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### **Compatibility and Expansion**
*Tilt 5* is designed to work with a variety of devices, including modern Android phones, PCs, and even the *Steam Deck*. The team has optimized compatibility across these platforms, ensuring seamless gameplay on any device. With the upcoming release of Android drivers, users will have even more flexibility in how they play their favorite AR games.
The headset also supports multi-headset functionality over USB, allowing multiple players to connect to a single PC or laptop for shared gaming experiences. This setup is perfect for group play, as it eliminates the need for each participant to bring their own high-end hardware.
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### **Future of *Tilt 5* and Availability**
As of now, *Tilt 5* is shipping its production units, with pre-orders available on the company's website. The team expects to catch up on backlogged orders by the end of summer, so interested users should act quickly to secure their own units.
In conclusion, the *Tilt 5 AR gaming headset* represents a significant leap forward in immersive technology, offering unparalleled comfort, versatility, and accessibility for tabletop gamers and beyond. With its innovative hardware, user-friendly software, and growing library of games, *Tilt 5* is poised to redefine how we play and share experiences together.
For those curious about the novel AR technology behind *Tilt 5*, the video linked in the description provides an in-depth preview. Stay tuned for a full deep dive and review once our own *Tilt 5* unit arrives—it’s going to be unforgettable!
"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enit was in the before times that we first looked at the technology of tilt 5 the augmented reality gaming headset invented by jerry ellsworth i backed the tilt 5 kickstarter because i loved their approach to tabletop pr which promised to bring a new level of immersion to everything from board games to dnd the production units are now shipping so we caught up with jerry to check out the latest hardware and demo some ar games jerry so good to see you again so good to see you you're one of my favorite people on the planet we have not had a chance to catch up since back when you guys watch the world lockdown yeah but it was so exciting for you because you had launched the kickstarter for top five the ar glasses that we'd follow you developed over the past decade largest ever ar project on kickstarter uh thanks to you for coming in uh just before and doing some uh well thanks for sharing that with us the prototypes but this is not a prototype these are representative of your production units you guys are finally shipping yes we're shipping yeah full mass production now so we're scaling up production and you know this is exactly what you're going to get in a few weeks oh my god i'm super excited and we'll be covering of course the actual shipping units but i want to catch up and learn about you know what's changed in terms of the hardware what have you guys used this time to not only build up the software library work with community but also kind of refine the experience so much has changed so you know when we did the kickstarter we kind of knew the direction we wanted to go then covet hit we had to focus on like how do we manufacture during covid so a lot of our resources went towards making robotic fixtures that we could ship on pallets over to the factory in china and uh to be able to do manufacturing but in the meantime the software team got busy on improving the hardware and i think last time we talked we didn't have any of this reprojection stuff going so we have the ability to take frame rates from game engines and upscale them to 180 frames a second no matter what's happening in the game but what that really means is that you can have like multiple players running off on pc and the glasses do all the heavy lifting so it takes all the load off the pc that was a big question because you guys are making the hardware but not the compute side of it yeah we're lying you want as many people with you know gaming pcs or just your standard kind of uh work computers with a decent gpu to be able to run this so what's the base level spec that you're kind of aiming for now my personal machine i use at home has intel graphics in it if it just tells you so it doesn't have to be super high-end to have a good experience but it varies right you know since we're plugged into a pc or an android device you know you can choose different uh levels of games with more like graphics detail so you saw a uh kind of diablo-like game there that has like tons of geometry and the developer didn't even bother to optimize so like when you're doing vr you have to optimize optimum optimize make sure you maintain like 90 or 120 frames a second who cares like as long as the animations look smooth everything gets locked to the game board it's buttery smooth and the re-rejection happens in the headset that's it yeah and you're reprojecting up to 180 fps yeah so as i use it it looked buttery smooth and you know the the graphics the visuals are sharp animations were smooth but you could theoretically have multiple headsets plugged into one laptop all just over usb yep yep just usb c's our standard uh connection on it and then we have adapter so you can go into usb 3. uh i recently got a steam deck and i saw that some people in your community also received theirs they beat us to the punch it seems like a perfect marriage right it is it is so snappy and fast it's perfect for our system like we plugged it in had it going in like 10 minutes and we're like wow that's a great piece of hardware so kudos to the the valve team for putting that together and if you have the proper like a splitter or usb hub then you could get multiple devices on something like that plugging the power and running you know on four sides of a game board yeah exactly um we're about ready to release our android drivers so that's going to reduce the friction for people to have like multi-game multiplayer games so you just plug into a fairly modern android phone and then you'll be able to play right off the phone and then now we just introduced mixcast that's exciting so you can stream your game out to twitch youtube or to a local monitor and that uh does compositing so as your friends are sitting around playing the game together you know you can just stream it out and it's like right there on the table and that's because the way you've designed the sdk so that it's going to be rendering multiple views because it's made for multiple headsets you could just take that principle and make one be an extra you know asymmetrical flat screen view live streaming view compositing view as long as you have the head room yeah yeah it's uh it's really really nice i mean that's the hardest thing to like kind of sell our products like it's holograms on the table popping out but when you say it it's not the same thing as seeing it so this is the closest thing we've come to being able to like convey what the magic's like yeah and that also allows for experiences where it could be someone playing the flat screen version on the pc while someone on that monitor while someone's in a headset here yeah so a bunch of the games that have been developed for our system or cross-play so ones that come to mind are like tabletopia where you have all your favorite board games in there um you can jump on your pc if you don't have your till five headset yet and play against your buddies that are on the till five headset right because we don't touch networking at all so if the game already has networking it just works automatically it's just rendering it slightly differently for the headset yeah and not requiring all that extra rendering because you're doing the hardware boost on that and the feature that's coming out real soon that i'm excited about is the multi-headset on one pc spectator mode and so we're working through the ui on this right now but what that means is you know i maybe i'm playing a single player game you could plug in another headset and spectate the holograms on the table and watch and maybe i play the first level and we're gonna have a way that we can transfer control to you like you play the second level right and so single-player experiences can now have like this group experience bringing people together and you can share the fun but they'd be viewing from their perspective tracking yeah and it's rendering multiple tracking except there's no necessary input needed it can still be a single-player game yep yep i think that's probably the first in the industry to be able to do that so i'm really excited because i think that's one of like one of our biggest value propositions is bringing groups of people together and sharing like we're all stuck in our our single screen experiences in my living room i've got two big televisions two xboxes two playstations for kind of broken you know two-player experience and the third person comes over now they can't play they're sitting their board right so we want to make it so that you just all come together and play and get away from just like looking at a single player screen and they don't even need to bring necessarily their own laptop they can just bring the headset in and plug it in yeah um in the time sense from the prototypes to production hardware have there been any differences in you know uh like the projection supply or oh yeah upgrades that you've made in that time yeah well thanks to my co-founder we came up with a clever way to mimic a life field okay you experience that where you can focus your eyes in foreground and background and things go in and out of focus naturally and what that means is it's more comfortable to look at but you're not are you not re-rendering or displaying multiple views how does that work with it turns out like we had like a combination of lenses and apertures in there and when we thought about it like well the light's actually going out like this and then getting reflected back by the retroflector if we just tweak that a tiny bit now the light rays are going to be coming back at the right uh convergence and and so it just magically worked and we don't have to do any extra compute for it because you're using two projectors here you're blasting out the photons and it really is just it's really a light field because you're getting all the actual photons and you have the distance not only head to table but bounce back as well yeah and you know we have the giant eye box that means that the glasses can be positioned on your face anywhere i noticed that i didn't need to have it like calibrated from my head it just they went out of the holy grail for ar to have like all the features we have in here so you just slip it on 30 seconds you're in and playing without any ratcheting things down or adjusting or calibrating for eye distance it doesn't matter on our system that is so cool what's the the library look like right now you mentioned so many different types of games i know when you did the kickstarter you had a bunch of partners some of those are online now those partner games are there like tabletopia and battle map studio if you're a d d player um we have a probably between 50 and 60 games it'll be out by the end of the year yeah there's a ton of developers working on stuff and then just out of the blue people just show up like hey i made a thing right or i had a game and i just put your sdk in and boom like there's another game it's just happening now on like on a weekly basis we were we were stunned um two or three weeks ago a group reached out to us they'd gotten one of our dev kits and they had done a game for cancer patients and apparently you can kids will recover faster if they fight cancer and they're using our system and we didn't even know it was happening and we're like oh you're using the old sdk you're using like oh you should have reached out we could have like helped you like do even better and they don't need to optimize like you said like yeah just make the interface and experience work authorization can come later and it's that's that's the benefit you have not having all this extra overhead yeah and our sdk allows you to do uh real-time editing so we're really proud of that so if you're a game developer you don't have to build the game put it into the headset view it find out that you made a mistake go back and guess like how to move things or tweak things in that big long cycle you just plug it in and then you just run unity or unreal and you just move things around in real time you just look at the board and it's happening in real time so the time it takes people to develop applications it's just like that now yeah and of course you want to get this in as many hands of people as possible not just the backers so in order now okay yeah so what's the state if someone you know wants to check this out and pre-orders you know what's the timeline like yeah we can we have pre-orders on our website we think by the end of the summer we'll be caught up uh we have a lots of orders coming in so we're getting backlogged but manufacturing is going up their capacity is going up and so you can get in there and get in line and get one i can't wait till my back unit finally arrives jerry so good to see you thank you so thank you so much for giving me the demos i'm so glad this is a real thing now we've been so excited for this technology for the longest time congratulations again thank you we'll have a full deep dive and review of the tilt 5 headset when our backward unit arrives and if you're curious about the novel ar technology that makes it work watch our in-depth preview linked in the description belowit was in the before times that we first looked at the technology of tilt 5 the augmented reality gaming headset invented by jerry ellsworth i backed the tilt 5 kickstarter because i loved their approach to tabletop pr which promised to bring a new level of immersion to everything from board games to dnd the production units are now shipping so we caught up with jerry to check out the latest hardware and demo some ar games jerry so good to see you again so good to see you you're one of my favorite people on the planet we have not had a chance to catch up since back when you guys watch the world lockdown yeah but it was so exciting for you because you had launched the kickstarter for top five the ar glasses that we'd follow you developed over the past decade largest ever ar project on kickstarter uh thanks to you for coming in uh just before and doing some uh well thanks for sharing that with us the prototypes but this is not a prototype these are representative of your production units you guys are finally shipping yes we're shipping yeah full mass production now so we're scaling up production and you know this is exactly what you're going to get in a few weeks oh my god i'm super excited and we'll be covering of course the actual shipping units but i want to catch up and learn about you know what's changed in terms of the hardware what have you guys used this time to not only build up the software library work with community but also kind of refine the experience so much has changed so you know when we did the kickstarter we kind of knew the direction we wanted to go then covet hit we had to focus on like how do we manufacture during covid so a lot of our resources went towards making robotic fixtures that we could ship on pallets over to the factory in china and uh to be able to do manufacturing but in the meantime the software team got busy on improving the hardware and i think last time we talked we didn't have any of this reprojection stuff going so we have the ability to take frame rates from game engines and upscale them to 180 frames a second no matter what's happening in the game but what that really means is that you can have like multiple players running off on pc and the glasses do all the heavy lifting so it takes all the load off the pc that was a big question because you guys are making the hardware but not the compute side of it yeah we're lying you want as many people with you know gaming pcs or just your standard kind of uh work computers with a decent gpu to be able to run this so what's the base level spec that you're kind of aiming for now my personal machine i use at home has intel graphics in it if it just tells you so it doesn't have to be super high-end to have a good experience but it varies right you know since we're plugged into a pc or an android device you know you can choose different uh levels of games with more like graphics detail so you saw a uh kind of diablo-like game there that has like tons of geometry and the developer didn't even bother to optimize so like when you're doing vr you have to optimize optimum optimize make sure you maintain like 90 or 120 frames a second who cares like as long as the animations look smooth everything gets locked to the game board it's buttery smooth and the re-rejection happens in the headset that's it yeah and you're reprojecting up to 180 fps yeah so as i use it it looked buttery smooth and you know the the graphics the visuals are sharp animations were smooth but you could theoretically have multiple headsets plugged into one laptop all just over usb yep yep just usb c's our standard uh connection on it and then we have adapter so you can go into usb 3. uh i recently got a steam deck and i saw that some people in your community also received theirs they beat us to the punch it seems like a perfect marriage right it is it is so snappy and fast it's perfect for our system like we plugged it in had it going in like 10 minutes and we're like wow that's a great piece of hardware so kudos to the the valve team for putting that together and if you have the proper like a splitter or usb hub then you could get multiple devices on something like that plugging the power and running you know on four sides of a game board yeah exactly um we're about ready to release our android drivers so that's going to reduce the friction for people to have like multi-game multiplayer games so you just plug into a fairly modern android phone and then you'll be able to play right off the phone and then now we just introduced mixcast that's exciting so you can stream your game out to twitch youtube or to a local monitor and that uh does compositing so as your friends are sitting around playing the game together you know you can just stream it out and it's like right there on the table and that's because the way you've designed the sdk so that it's going to be rendering multiple views because it's made for multiple headsets you could just take that principle and make one be an extra you know asymmetrical flat screen view live streaming view compositing view as long as you have the head room yeah yeah it's uh it's really really nice i mean that's the hardest thing to like kind of sell our products like it's holograms on the table popping out but when you say it it's not the same thing as seeing it so this is the closest thing we've come to being able to like convey what the magic's like yeah and that also allows for experiences where it could be someone playing the flat screen version on the pc while someone on that monitor while someone's in a headset here yeah so a bunch of the games that have been developed for our system or cross-play so ones that come to mind are like tabletopia where you have all your favorite board games in there um you can jump on your pc if you don't have your till five headset yet and play against your buddies that are on the till five headset right because we don't touch networking at all so if the game already has networking it just works automatically it's just rendering it slightly differently for the headset yeah and not requiring all that extra rendering because you're doing the hardware boost on that and the feature that's coming out real soon that i'm excited about is the multi-headset on one pc spectator mode and so we're working through the ui on this right now but what that means is you know i maybe i'm playing a single player game you could plug in another headset and spectate the holograms on the table and watch and maybe i play the first level and we're gonna have a way that we can transfer control to you like you play the second level right and so single-player experiences can now have like this group experience bringing people together and you can share the fun but they'd be viewing from their perspective tracking yeah and it's rendering multiple tracking except there's no necessary input needed it can still be a single-player game yep yep i think that's probably the first in the industry to be able to do that so i'm really excited because i think that's one of like one of our biggest value propositions is bringing groups of people together and sharing like we're all stuck in our our single screen experiences in my living room i've got two big televisions two xboxes two playstations for kind of broken you know two-player experience and the third person comes over now they can't play they're sitting their board right so we want to make it so that you just all come together and play and get away from just like looking at a single player screen and they don't even need to bring necessarily their own laptop they can just bring the headset in and plug it in yeah um in the time sense from the prototypes to production hardware have there been any differences in you know uh like the projection supply or oh yeah upgrades that you've made in that time yeah well thanks to my co-founder we came up with a clever way to mimic a life field okay you experience that where you can focus your eyes in foreground and background and things go in and out of focus naturally and what that means is it's more comfortable to look at but you're not are you not re-rendering or displaying multiple views how does that work with it turns out like we had like a combination of lenses and apertures in there and when we thought about it like well the light's actually going out like this and then getting reflected back by the retroflector if we just tweak that a tiny bit now the light rays are going to be coming back at the right uh convergence and and so it just magically worked and we don't have to do any extra compute for it because you're using two projectors here you're blasting out the photons and it really is just it's really a light field because you're getting all the actual photons and you have the distance not only head to table but bounce back as well yeah and you know we have the giant eye box that means that the glasses can be positioned on your face anywhere i noticed that i didn't need to have it like calibrated from my head it just they went out of the holy grail for ar to have like all the features we have in here so you just slip it on 30 seconds you're in and playing without any ratcheting things down or adjusting or calibrating for eye distance it doesn't matter on our system that is so cool what's the the library look like right now you mentioned so many different types of games i know when you did the kickstarter you had a bunch of partners some of those are online now those partner games are there like tabletopia and battle map studio if you're a d d player um we have a probably between 50 and 60 games it'll be out by the end of the year yeah there's a ton of developers working on stuff and then just out of the blue people just show up like hey i made a thing right or i had a game and i just put your sdk in and boom like there's another game it's just happening now on like on a weekly basis we were we were stunned um two or three weeks ago a group reached out to us they'd gotten one of our dev kits and they had done a game for cancer patients and apparently you can kids will recover faster if they fight cancer and they're using our system and we didn't even know it was happening and we're like oh you're using the old sdk you're using like oh you should have reached out we could have like helped you like do even better and they don't need to optimize like you said like yeah just make the interface and experience work authorization can come later and it's that's that's the benefit you have not having all this extra overhead yeah and our sdk allows you to do uh real-time editing so we're really proud of that so if you're a game developer you don't have to build the game put it into the headset view it find out that you made a mistake go back and guess like how to move things or tweak things in that big long cycle you just plug it in and then you just run unity or unreal and you just move things around in real time you just look at the board and it's happening in real time so the time it takes people to develop applications it's just like that now yeah and of course you want to get this in as many hands of people as possible not just the backers so in order now okay yeah so what's the state if someone you know wants to check this out and pre-orders you know what's the timeline like yeah we can we have pre-orders on our website we think by the end of the summer we'll be caught up uh we have a lots of orders coming in so we're getting backlogged but manufacturing is going up their capacity is going up and so you can get in there and get in line and get one i can't wait till my back unit finally arrives jerry so good to see you thank you so thank you so much for giving me the demos i'm so glad this is a real thing now we've been so excited for this technology for the longest time congratulations again thank you we'll have a full deep dive and review of the tilt 5 headset when our backward unit arrives and if you're curious about the novel ar technology that makes it work watch our in-depth preview linked in the description below\n"