Originally published at: Finally getting a look at the production Tilt Five augmented reality glasses | Boing Boing
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Good for Jeri! She’s worked incredibly hard on this for so long, and it’s an amazing idea. Wishing her all the best. Hope to get my hands on one someday.
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By all accounts it’s a great product, but I’m doubtfull it’ll sell very well. Now that general-purpose VR/AR is well established and about to go mainstream with Apple’s headset, Tilt Five is like the best car phone ever releasing at the beginning of the pocket cell phone era.
I got to play a DnD encounter with the Tilt5. It was really neat to have 4 people looking at the same augmented reality, even mixing physical miniatures with game mobs/avatars. I also got a Tilt5 t-shirt, which quickly became my favorite shirt.
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The best case scenario for the company making this is that they’ll get it developed far enough that the tech, or the company will get bought out by a larger company looking to shortcut their development into the AR field. Still i wish them success because the product looks great for TTRPG’s and the like
It does, but the problem is that’s all it does. Whereas a VR headset can do the same thing, plus everything else VR can do, and without requiring the other players to be physically present. Demeo for example is a wonderful VR TTRPG.
both AR and VR are things I never really got massively interested in, because a) I wear prescription glasses(1), and b) the whole ‘glasshole’ perception.
1- AKA “let’s take an already expensive headset and make it even more expensive!!!”
And while there’s money in the TTRPG market, there’s not that much money in something that requires your average group to spend almost two grand in aggregate. Yeah, there are some whales, but it can be a challenge to get everyone in a group to even buy a book, let alone a headset that makes you look extremely silly to anyone not wearing one.
They could also be hoping to address the broader tabletop gaming market, but you have the same problem. I own a lot of boardgames, but even if they had every boardgame on the planet, it’d be a pretty hard sell. Basically, I’m spending two grand plus whatever I have to spend to buy a game on their platform (and just like Steam, publishers are not gonna want to undercut their physical media sales). And I get a couple benefits - it takes up a lot less storage space, it’s easier to travel with than more than a couple big games, and (presumably) it can automate a lot of the mechanical parts of the game. But in exchange, I lose all of the nice tactility of a game, I have to have power to play,I definitely don’t want to take it to a party, and I can’t have pick-up players unless they have their own glasses or I bought extras (for $360 each) just in case.
And for anything other than a shared, in-person game night, it’s the worst of both worlds: you’ve got the tethered in one spot disadvantage of VR with the visual inferiority of AR.
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