Tilt Five AR Glasses and VP

[Firepower]

Jeri Ellsworth, you many of you may know as a maker on YouTube, has created a company called Tilt Five to develop tabletop AR glasses.  This isn’t your typical AR which obscures your view, but a tabletop reflector board and 85g goggles that let you see your hands and the people around you   The boards can be extended, and even tilted!  www.tiltfive.com

They finished the kickstarter at about $1.8mil which was way oversubscribed, and also got another $7.5mil in backing from early investors.   So it’s for real and has round $10mil funding.

So why virtual pinball?  It’s already obvious to me this platform is awesome, it will  run on a PC, MacBook or an iPad.  It comes in at around $400 for a starter pack and should ship early next year (2021).   It also is planned to allow virtual players over the internet... I assume the game engine would need to be written to support that function.  It supports Unity, via an SDK and people are already working on VPE using Unity to bring in tables and render them in 3D with lighting.  No more building an awkward cabinet with a flat LCD screen in it, this system *might* even  let you flip virually with your hands, as it tracks them in real time.  But if you wanted buttons, no problem.  You could add an additional tilted board to display the Backglass and Score displays / DMD.  

I’m excited and totally in.  If you watch some youtube videos like this one you will see what I mean:

 

I recently posted this on discord:

“I’m not much into D&D (or any RPG type board game, tbh) which Tilt Five seems be aimed at. But I know people who are into that scene... For me, Pinball ! I can’t afford to buy all the pinball games I would like to own, but if T5 supported Virtual Pinball or some other engine that would play real Pinball ROMs that would be awesome.  Obviously they would need people willing to render the playfields in 3D, but that can’t be impossible.  Timeshock! was awesome even on a PC “back in the day”.   It’s already getting there! Using Unity and VPE - pinball would be such a cool port, and would help sell the product.  I missed the Kickstarter, but have pre-ordered based on this possibility.”

-Richard (firepower)

Disclaimer.: I’m just a pinball guy excited by the possibilities.  I have no connection to any of the products or development.