7 ms·

Tilt-5 Was Magical

153 points by jpm_sd 5y ago

sparsely 5y ago
I didn't realise how precise the reflections from retro-reflective materials were. I'd always just thought they were for high vis gear, cool to see such a creative use for them here!
- rkangel 5y ago
  It's taken me a moment to think things through, but they only need to be precise enough to get back to the relevant user and not the one 90 degrees round the table. The precision that's important is the projector. You project the top left 'pixel' to the top left of the board, it retro reflects back in your general direction from the top left of the board. Same for bottom right and all the other pixels. I presume the better the retro-reflectivity the more efficient the system is (because less light is wasted going to places that aren't your eye), but it only needs to be 90 degree ish good enough for selectivity
  - ajayyy 5y ago
    There is a different image per eye, so much more precise than that
    - PaulHoule 5y ago
      You don't need perfect separation to get a good stereo effect. My son bought a pack of red-blue 3d glasses and we were looking at anaglyphic images online and enjoying them even though the images weren't perfectly clean. In 3-d movies (Toy Story 3d) there are places where an isolated really bright object shows through cross channels and there some double imaging but it doesn't break the 3d. These work for most people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Eye https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Eye and the channels aren't separated at all, your brain are doing it all out of desperation for closure. (Blood in the Gutter!)
      - aidenn0 5y ago
        Crosstalk can cause nausea and headaches in some people, just like VAC and motion lag. That being said, circular polarization off of a retro reflective screen is one of the two state of the art ways of doing step stereo 3d: if you saw Avatar in a modern theater, there's a good chance that was used, so crosstalk should be minimal and much better than with an anaglyph. [edit] I should also note that circular polarization is different from the linear polarization that was used e.g. in Disney attractions in the '90s (and thus still used in some of the older attractions). With linear polarization if you tilt your head 45 degrees to one side or the other you will get an even mix of the L/R channels in each eye. Circular polarization does not have that issue. Though it seems to me with the projector originating from the same plane as the glasses, circular polarization would be redundant. I'm sure the engineers there know more than someone who dropped out of physics after flunking the optics lab though :)
    - rkangel 5y ago
      If you read the article, the retro-reflectivity is not used to separate left and right eye images. Two different projections with different polarisations are done, and then filtered into the correct eyes. See the section "Left and Right Eye Stereo Polarization" under "A little of the physics".
k__ 5y ago
I think, AR like this is the future of gaming. VR is a cool idea, but it falls short on so many levels. It looks cool to go into a space that isn't there, but you always have issues with the mismatch of your surroundings and the VR world. Playing Xing, and the recent Myst remake is awesome on desktop, but very tiresome on VR. The haptics are obviously not there and either you can't really walk where you need to go or you "teleport" around which feels strange. Overall its tiring mentally and physically.
- danielvaughn 5y ago
  And the motion sickness, ugh. I'm not prone to motion sickness, but for some reason the subtle delays really affect me. I don't quite feel sick necessarily, but if I do VR for about 10 minutes, I feel just kinda off for about 3-5 hours afterwards. It's not a good feeling. I honestly don't really think it will become a household thing until they develop black-mirror-type contact lenses.
  - roywiggins 5y ago
    I am somewhat prone to it, and I got seasick for about 12 hours from 30 minutes of sedate VR once. Eventually I realized what I needed to do was go outside and walk around to reset things. I haven't had anything that bad since- spending a bit more time in VR helps a lot- but it's not like I can just hand someone a headset and tell them to try it for more than a couple minutes without risking ruining their day.
- taeric 5y ago
  This cracks me up. I don't think you are wrong, but I also remember not liking the original myst, thinking it was mainly a gimmick for cdrom drives. So, not being wrong doesn't necessarily mean you are right. There is a chance the vr world lights up. Hard to really say.
  - Causality1 5y ago
    As someone whose VR headset has been collecting dust for a year, I think the key is movement. Moving in VR just sucks. Either you teleport around which is disorienting or you slide with a stick which is nauseating. All my favorite VR experiences didn't require me to move further than my play area. If someone comes up with a cheap omnidirectional treadmill or something just as good it'll blow the market wide open. Until then, almost everything is more fun on a normal screen than in VR.
vanderZwan 5y ago
Could we put the reflector on a wall, blow it up, and use it as a window with virtual screens behind it to create a "multi-monitor" set-up like others are trying out in VR right now? Or do the tracking markers have a limitation in how big a rectangle they can follow?
- VikingCoder 5y ago
  > The resolution is a modest 1280 by 720p > It has a 110-degree field of view With that big of a field of view, and that low of a resolution, I don't think you'd be happy with reading text. But I'm just guessing.
  - vanderZwan 5y ago
    That only applies to projection cone + pixels on the glasses. It's not how it necessarily translates to "effective" resolution on the wall when moving your head. I mean, I don't typically read with the corner of my eye. The eye saccades are relatively central.
  - mdp2021 5y ago
    1280x720 AR eyeset can be good to excellent for reading text (I do it often). But, the comfort is around a dozen lines (or less) per screen...
    - VikingCoder 5y ago
      I suspect you are used to those 1280x720 being applied to a far, far smaller field of view. 110 degrees is remarkably wide.
      - mdp2021 5y ago
        Absolutely. The device is an Epson Moverio. I see through a quick search that the FoV should be 23°. And mind you, in some conditions the characters at the borders can lose focus or gain artefacts. The display could sure gain from extra lines (a resolution of 1280x960, instead of 1280x720, could be optimal to my estimation) without causing visual issues, but potential visual issues with the left and right extremes are already evident.
Fnoord 5y ago
This would be a cool way to play a virtual version of M:tG or Hearthstone. Or Netrunner or Slay the Spire. Or Warhammer (Quest). Etc etc. Especially during a pandemic. But one can also already play RPGs where you have to use your imagination instead. Then you are the VR/AR.
invisible 5y ago
So excited to have backed this myself. It's been...a long time coming. Not just from this kickstarter, but a past kickstarter. The craziest part is that this is what it can do _before many people even have it in their hands_. The potential for this tech (outside of gaming even) is pretty far-reaching. So glad that Jeri was able to get this thing to fruition this go-around amid the pandemic and all of the logistic problems that has created for creating new tech.
ChuckMcM 5y ago
Disclosure, I have done some consulting for Tilt-5. I really don’t think people appreciate the technology of a retro reflective game surface and individual viewers. The concept that everyone gets to look at the game board from their own perspective is simultaneously “of course” and completely unintuitive to folks who are thinking “computer game.” I am not sure why this is but so often the comment from people who see the glasses for the first time is “Wow! I really didn’t know what to expect I guess, this is AMAZING!” After it is out there, and people have them in their hands, I expect WoC to wake up and say “Holy crap, we could do MtG tournaments with this without renting a venue.” And I give Jeri a lot of credit for holding on to her vision of AR on game boards. That got out of her control at CastAR but here I think it is going to ship as envisioned and be marvelous.
- treis 5y ago
  The problem with hidden state is interacting with hidden state. Like if we're playing battleship the partition blocks you from seeing where I place my ships. But with a filtered display you can see where I move my hand and know there's a ship there. In short, hidden state requires hidden interaction which means some sort of controller. At that point we might as well be playing video games on separate screens. I think what we want is better board games. Which means cooperative play in a large world. Or maybe cool graphics. Or maybe the convenience of not having to buy/store physical games.
  - ChuckMcM 5y ago
    So excellent idea. Consider that the players are in different rooms/places potentially thousands of miles apart. You look down at a patch of ocean with your ships arrayed and floating as if at anchor. Using the wand, you move over the game board and a light grid it superimposed on the surface of the ocean. As you reach a grid you suspect might have a ship or boat you click the wand trigger. A projectile come in from off screen and either you see a splash in the ocean or an explosion. With some debris around it. You repeat with the grid square next to it and another explosion and then a flaming patrol boat visualizes and sinks before your eyes. Meanwhile when your opponent moves, in your array of ships you see the ocean splash as they take shots that don't hit your ships, and when they do, your ship begins to burn and flame. Eventually they get enough hits that the ship will sink. At that point both you and you opponent get to watch it sink. You cannot see your opponent or their hands so that state is always hidden.
nraynaud 5y ago
As an anecdote, the CEO of tilt five wrote the guidance software for the Astra rocket that went sideways when an engine quit upon takeoff.
- sterlind 5y ago
  That was an amazing demo of Astra's guidance, in a positive way. Scott Manley did a video on it. Once the engine quit, the rest of the engines had to be vectored completely over to keep the rocket pointed up. And it did! If guidance hadn't been so adaptive, the rocket would have nosedived and blown up on the launch pad.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- wumpus 5y ago
  That's how I remember the story, too, but I ran into Jeri at a conference a couple of weeks ago and she said she actually did the telemetry system. Which is also amazing.
  - nraynaud 5y ago
    oops, sorry for the misinformation
Taywee 5y ago
I would love to work something like this into my D&D sessions. Looks amazing.
kingcharles 5y ago
Magic! That was the same feeling I had when I saw my first autostereoscopic display in about 1997 playing some DOOM-like game. I ACTUALLY LOOKED BEHIND THE DISPLAY LIKE I WAS A CAVEMAN TRYING TO FIGURE OUT HOW THE LITTLE PEOPLE GOT INSIDE THE BOX. O_O
ksec 5y ago
Copied From michaelbuckbee [1] Ellsworth is a personal hero of mine - incredibly smart, wildly talented and has a real vision for this space. All that being said, it's a nightmare of a space which is why I don't think there's been a big funding event for Tilt5. "Meta View" was an AR company that raised $75mil, had a star studded list of VR/AR technology folks, only ever shipped a couple thousand units and now is defunct. Magic Leap raised $3.5 Billion and now has given up on shipping a consumer device (Enterprise only). Microsoft's Hololens exited consumer applications even earlier, enterprise only. Oculus Quest is the most successful consumer VR tech (about 5 million sold) but it's really unclear if they're anywhere close to turning a profit and they've spent tons to try and jump start game developers in VR. Tilt5 would require from the ground up games to be made, large volumes of orders/units to be profitable and even if all that came together could still be kneecapped by chip shortages and supply chain issues. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29322696 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29322696
Karliss 5y ago
Do any of current VR headsets do reprojection within headset independently from the game framerate similar to what tilt-5 does? I would expect it to help a lot with minimizing any delays and thus reducing motion sickness. Shouldn't it work even better with VR since most objects are further away from eyes compared to virtual tabletop thus smaller change in shape of them when doing minor head movements? I can think of two potential problems with VR reprojection that don't affect tilt-5 as much. Virtual tabletop rendered by most tilt-5 applications is closer to being flat surface which can be reprojected perfectly (ignoring pixel density). There is no rendered content to draw on the edges of screen when turning the head left or right, in case of tilt-5 unless your head is very close to the board nothing is rendered on the edges of FOV anyway since the board is in the middle of it. Might not be too much of problem since FOV edges need less details. Simply fading black or generating filler based on edge colors similar to TVs with ambilight might be good enough. There is also an option to render slightly wider FOV to give some buffer area if it means that hitting high framerate isn't as critical.
- bencoder 5y ago
  Yes, all of the headsets do some form of reprojection if frames are not generated fast enough, or to account for the latency between generation and display. If you turn your head fast you'll see black at the edges where it's not caught up
supermatt 5y ago
Wonder if you could "hack" it to work with retroreflective walls...

153 points by jpm_sd 5y ago

I didn't realise how precise the reflections from retro-reflective materials were. I'd always just thought they were for high vis gear, cool to see such a creative use for them here!

rkangel 5y ago
It's taken me a moment to think things through, but they only need to be precise enough to get back to the relevant user and not the one 90 degrees round the table. The precision that's important is the projector. You project the top left 'pixel' to the top left of the board, it retro reflects back in your general direction from the top left of the board. Same for bottom right and all the other pixels. I presume the better the retro-reflectivity the more efficient the system is (because less light is wasted going to places that aren't your eye), but it only needs to be 90 degree ish good enough for selectivity
- ajayyy 5y ago
  There is a different image per eye, so much more precise than that
  - PaulHoule 5y ago
    You don't need perfect separation to get a good stereo effect. My son bought a pack of red-blue 3d glasses and we were looking at anaglyphic images online and enjoying them even though the images weren't perfectly clean. In 3-d movies (Toy Story 3d) there are places where an isolated really bright object shows through cross channels and there some double imaging but it doesn't break the 3d. These work for most people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Eye https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Eye and the channels aren't separated at all, your brain are doing it all out of desperation for closure. (Blood in the Gutter!)
    - aidenn0 5y ago
      Crosstalk can cause nausea and headaches in some people, just like VAC and motion lag. That being said, circular polarization off of a retro reflective screen is one of the two state of the art ways of doing step stereo 3d: if you saw Avatar in a modern theater, there's a good chance that was used, so crosstalk should be minimal and much better than with an anaglyph. [edit] I should also note that circular polarization is different from the linear polarization that was used e.g. in Disney attractions in the '90s (and thus still used in some of the older attractions). With linear polarization if you tilt your head 45 degrees to one side or the other you will get an even mix of the L/R channels in each eye. Circular polarization does not have that issue. Though it seems to me with the projector originating from the same plane as the glasses, circular polarization would be redundant. I'm sure the engineers there know more than someone who dropped out of physics after flunking the optics lab though :)
  - rkangel 5y ago
    If you read the article, the retro-reflectivity is not used to separate left and right eye images. Two different projections with different polarisations are done, and then filtered into the correct eyes. See the section "Left and Right Eye Stereo Polarization" under "A little of the physics".

k__ 5y ago

I think, AR like this is the future of gaming. VR is a cool idea, but it falls short on so many levels. It looks cool to go into a space that isn't there, but you always have issues with the mismatch of your surroundings and the VR world. Playing Xing, and the recent Myst remake is awesome on desktop, but very tiresome on VR. The haptics are obviously not there and either you can't really walk where you need to go or you "teleport" around which feels strange. Overall its tiring mentally and physically.

danielvaughn 5y ago
And the motion sickness, ugh. I'm not prone to motion sickness, but for some reason the subtle delays really affect me. I don't quite feel sick necessarily, but if I do VR for about 10 minutes, I feel just kinda off for about 3-5 hours afterwards. It's not a good feeling. I honestly don't really think it will become a household thing until they develop black-mirror-type contact lenses.
- roywiggins 5y ago
  I am somewhat prone to it, and I got seasick for about 12 hours from 30 minutes of sedate VR once. Eventually I realized what I needed to do was go outside and walk around to reset things. I haven't had anything that bad since- spending a bit more time in VR helps a lot- but it's not like I can just hand someone a headset and tell them to try it for more than a couple minutes without risking ruining their day.
taeric 5y ago
This cracks me up. I don't think you are wrong, but I also remember not liking the original myst, thinking it was mainly a gimmick for cdrom drives. So, not being wrong doesn't necessarily mean you are right. There is a chance the vr world lights up. Hard to really say.
- Causality1 5y ago
  As someone whose VR headset has been collecting dust for a year, I think the key is movement. Moving in VR just sucks. Either you teleport around which is disorienting or you slide with a stick which is nauseating. All my favorite VR experiences didn't require me to move further than my play area. If someone comes up with a cheap omnidirectional treadmill or something just as good it'll blow the market wide open. Until then, almost everything is more fun on a normal screen than in VR.

vanderZwan 5y ago

Could we put the reflector on a wall, blow it up, and use it as a window with virtual screens behind it to create a "multi-monitor" set-up like others are trying out in VR right now? Or do the tracking markers have a limitation in how big a rectangle they can follow?

VikingCoder 5y ago
> The resolution is a modest 1280 by 720p > It has a 110-degree field of view With that big of a field of view, and that low of a resolution, I don't think you'd be happy with reading text. But I'm just guessing.
- vanderZwan 5y ago
  That only applies to projection cone + pixels on the glasses. It's not how it necessarily translates to "effective" resolution on the wall when moving your head. I mean, I don't typically read with the corner of my eye. The eye saccades are relatively central.
- mdp2021 5y ago
  1280x720 AR eyeset can be good to excellent for reading text (I do it often). But, the comfort is around a dozen lines (or less) per screen...
  - VikingCoder 5y ago
    I suspect you are used to those 1280x720 being applied to a far, far smaller field of view. 110 degrees is remarkably wide.
    - mdp2021 5y ago
      Absolutely. The device is an Epson Moverio. I see through a quick search that the FoV should be 23°. And mind you, in some conditions the characters at the borders can lose focus or gain artefacts. The display could sure gain from extra lines (a resolution of 1280x960, instead of 1280x720, could be optimal to my estimation) without causing visual issues, but potential visual issues with the left and right extremes are already evident.

Fnoord 5y ago

This would be a cool way to play a virtual version of M:tG or Hearthstone. Or Netrunner or Slay the Spire. Or Warhammer (Quest). Etc etc. Especially during a pandemic. But one can also already play RPGs where you have to use your imagination instead. Then you are the VR/AR.

invisible 5y ago

So excited to have backed this myself. It's been...a long time coming. Not just from this kickstarter, but a past kickstarter. The craziest part is that this is what it can do _before many people even have it in their hands_. The potential for this tech (outside of gaming even) is pretty far-reaching. So glad that Jeri was able to get this thing to fruition this go-around amid the pandemic and all of the logistic problems that has created for creating new tech.

ChuckMcM 5y ago

Disclosure, I have done some consulting for Tilt-5. I really don’t think people appreciate the technology of a retro reflective game surface and individual viewers. The concept that everyone gets to look at the game board from their own perspective is simultaneously “of course” and completely unintuitive to folks who are thinking “computer game.” I am not sure why this is but so often the comment from people who see the glasses for the first time is “Wow! I really didn’t know what to expect I guess, this is AMAZING!” After it is out there, and people have them in their hands, I expect WoC to wake up and say “Holy crap, we could do MtG tournaments with this without renting a venue.” And I give Jeri a lot of credit for holding on to her vision of AR on game boards. That got out of her control at CastAR but here I think it is going to ship as envisioned and be marvelous.

treis 5y ago
The problem with hidden state is interacting with hidden state. Like if we're playing battleship the partition blocks you from seeing where I place my ships. But with a filtered display you can see where I move my hand and know there's a ship there. In short, hidden state requires hidden interaction which means some sort of controller. At that point we might as well be playing video games on separate screens. I think what we want is better board games. Which means cooperative play in a large world. Or maybe cool graphics. Or maybe the convenience of not having to buy/store physical games.
- ChuckMcM 5y ago
  So excellent idea. Consider that the players are in different rooms/places potentially thousands of miles apart. You look down at a patch of ocean with your ships arrayed and floating as if at anchor. Using the wand, you move over the game board and a light grid it superimposed on the surface of the ocean. As you reach a grid you suspect might have a ship or boat you click the wand trigger. A projectile come in from off screen and either you see a splash in the ocean or an explosion. With some debris around it. You repeat with the grid square next to it and another explosion and then a flaming patrol boat visualizes and sinks before your eyes. Meanwhile when your opponent moves, in your array of ships you see the ocean splash as they take shots that don't hit your ships, and when they do, your ship begins to burn and flame. Eventually they get enough hits that the ship will sink. At that point both you and you opponent get to watch it sink. You cannot see your opponent or their hands so that state is always hidden.

nraynaud 5y ago

As an anecdote, the CEO of tilt five wrote the guidance software for the Astra rocket that went sideways when an engine quit upon takeoff.

sterlind 5y ago
That was an amazing demo of Astra's guidance, in a positive way. Scott Manley did a video on it. Once the engine quit, the rest of the engines had to be vectored completely over to keep the rocket pointed up. And it did! If guidance hadn't been so adaptive, the rocket would have nosedived and blown up on the launch pad.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
wumpus 5y ago
That's how I remember the story, too, but I ran into Jeri at a conference a couple of weeks ago and she said she actually did the telemetry system. Which is also amazing.
- nraynaud 5y ago
  oops, sorry for the misinformation

Taywee 5y ago

I would love to work something like this into my D&D sessions. Looks amazing.

kingcharles 5y ago

Magic! That was the same feeling I had when I saw my first autostereoscopic display in about 1997 playing some DOOM-like game. I ACTUALLY LOOKED BEHIND THE DISPLAY LIKE I WAS A CAVEMAN TRYING TO FIGURE OUT HOW THE LITTLE PEOPLE GOT INSIDE THE BOX. O_O

ksec 5y ago

Copied From michaelbuckbee [1] Ellsworth is a personal hero of mine - incredibly smart, wildly talented and has a real vision for this space. All that being said, it's a nightmare of a space which is why I don't think there's been a big funding event for Tilt5. "Meta View" was an AR company that raised $75mil, had a star studded list of VR/AR technology folks, only ever shipped a couple thousand units and now is defunct. Magic Leap raised $3.5 Billion and now has given up on shipping a consumer device (Enterprise only). Microsoft's Hololens exited consumer applications even earlier, enterprise only. Oculus Quest is the most successful consumer VR tech (about 5 million sold) but it's really unclear if they're anywhere close to turning a profit and they've spent tons to try and jump start game developers in VR. Tilt5 would require from the ground up games to be made, large volumes of orders/units to be profitable and even if all that came together could still be kneecapped by chip shortages and supply chain issues. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29322696 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29322696

Karliss 5y ago

Do any of current VR headsets do reprojection within headset independently from the game framerate similar to what tilt-5 does? I would expect it to help a lot with minimizing any delays and thus reducing motion sickness. Shouldn't it work even better with VR since most objects are further away from eyes compared to virtual tabletop thus smaller change in shape of them when doing minor head movements? I can think of two potential problems with VR reprojection that don't affect tilt-5 as much. Virtual tabletop rendered by most tilt-5 applications is closer to being flat surface which can be reprojected perfectly (ignoring pixel density). There is no rendered content to draw on the edges of screen when turning the head left or right, in case of tilt-5 unless your head is very close to the board nothing is rendered on the edges of FOV anyway since the board is in the middle of it. Might not be too much of problem since FOV edges need less details. Simply fading black or generating filler based on edge colors similar to TVs with ambilight might be good enough. There is also an option to render slightly wider FOV to give some buffer area if it means that hitting high framerate isn't as critical.

bencoder 5y ago
Yes, all of the headsets do some form of reprojection if frames are not generated fast enough, or to account for the latency between generation and display. If you turn your head fast you'll see black at the edges where it's not caught up

supermatt 5y ago

Wonder if you could "hack" it to work with retroreflective walls...