7 ms·

I bought one and was really disappointed - the visual didn't feel as 3D as I expected. Their marketing videos make it look like things really feel like they're

I bought one and was really disappointed - the visual didn't feel as 3D as I expected. Their marketing videos make it look like things really feel like they're coming up out of the board, and to me it just felt like the board was sort of a TV laid flat on the table. Things were 3D only in the same sense that they are on my monitor. 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.

BugsJustFindMe 3y ago
> Their marketing videos make it look like things really feel like they're coming up out of the board, and to me it just felt like the board was sort of a TV laid flat on the table. Things were 3D only in the same sense that they are on my monitor. 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.
- idopmstuff 3y ago
  I've done 3D movies, and they look as expected. 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.
  - BugsJustFindMe 3y ago
    Good to know! Thanks for the response.
  - mustacheemperor 3y ago
    This was also my takeaway from trying it at AWE2022. 3D works great on me, and I’ve always loved stereo 3D stuff even just for the gimmick value. But Tilt5 didn’t feel close enough to the experience of viewing through a hololens or looking at a real 3D display. I think that was especially obvious at the show, where vendors like Looking Glass and Sony had 3D displays with much more impressive depth and rendering capabilities. 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.
    - jgennis 3y ago
      I mentioned this in another comment below, but it likely applies here as well. We tune the interpupillary distance (IPD) software setting down a bit to accommodate a wider variety of face shapes. If the IPD is set to a distance greater than the physical distance between their eyes, then the effect is very uncomfortable to look at as their brain has trouble "unifying" the two images each eye is seeing. If the IPD is set to a distance less than the physical distance between their eyes, then the effect is perfectly comfortable, but there is reduced depth perceived from the images. 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!
      - mustacheemperor 3y ago
- moron4hire 3y ago
  I don't have stereoblindness and I agree with idopmstuff. There are several problems that I think stack up to make a relatively bland experience. 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.
  - jgennis 3y ago
    Co-founder and CTO of T5 here. > 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.
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vedran 3y ago
I had the same disappointing experience unfortunately. The best experience I had was actually the Fantasy Forest tech demo, which was hard to find. https://www.tiltfive.com/lab/fantasy-forest-tech-demo https://www.tiltfive.com/lab/fantasy-forest-tech-demo
nocoiner 3y ago
Really interesting post, thank you. I looked at the linked page, and had a really hard time figuring out what this, well, is, or how it’s supposed to work. It sounds to me like some of my naive initial reservations are impediments to actual use. 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.
allenu 3y ago
I remember trying it at PAX and was disappointed the effect didn't feel that strong to me either. I almost felt like something was broken or not calibrated since I could sense some 3D-ness, but it didn't jump out as truly 3D. 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.
- jgennis 3y ago
  I believe we tuned the interpupillary distance (IPD) down a bit for the demos at PAX. The IPD is a software setting that changes how far apart the two stereo images are drawn from. If it's set to a distance larger than the actual distance between your eyes then you'll perceive it as very strange (each eye seeing a different thing that your brain can't unify), and it will be very uncomfortable. If the IPD setting is set to a distance less than the actual distance between your eyes then you won't perceive as much depth when looking at it, but it's still fairly comfortable. The extreme version of this is just looking at normal monoscopic images (e.g. watching a movie) - perfectly comfortable, but no depth perceived from it. 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.
  - allenu 3y ago
    Thank you for the explanation. If I get another chance, I'll give it another try with that in mind.

BugsJustFindMe 3y ago

> Their marketing videos make it look like things really feel like they're coming up out of the board, and to me it just felt like the board was sort of a TV laid flat on the table. Things were 3D only in the same sense that they are on my monitor. 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.

idopmstuff 3y ago
I've done 3D movies, and they look as expected. 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.
- BugsJustFindMe 3y ago
  Good to know! Thanks for the response.
- mustacheemperor 3y ago
  This was also my takeaway from trying it at AWE2022. 3D works great on me, and I’ve always loved stereo 3D stuff even just for the gimmick value. But Tilt5 didn’t feel close enough to the experience of viewing through a hololens or looking at a real 3D display. I think that was especially obvious at the show, where vendors like Looking Glass and Sony had 3D displays with much more impressive depth and rendering capabilities. 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.
  - jgennis 3y ago
    I mentioned this in another comment below, but it likely applies here as well. We tune the interpupillary distance (IPD) software setting down a bit to accommodate a wider variety of face shapes. If the IPD is set to a distance greater than the physical distance between their eyes, then the effect is very uncomfortable to look at as their brain has trouble "unifying" the two images each eye is seeing. If the IPD is set to a distance less than the physical distance between their eyes, then the effect is perfectly comfortable, but there is reduced depth perceived from the images. 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!
    - mustacheemperor 3y ago
moron4hire 3y ago
I don't have stereoblindness and I agree with idopmstuff. There are several problems that I think stack up to make a relatively bland experience. 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.
- jgennis 3y ago
  Co-founder and CTO of T5 here. > 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.
deleted 3y ago
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deleted 3y ago
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vedran 3y ago

I had the same disappointing experience unfortunately. The best experience I had was actually the Fantasy Forest tech demo, which was hard to find. https://www.tiltfive.com/lab/fantasy-forest-tech-demo https://www.tiltfive.com/lab/fantasy-forest-tech-demo

nocoiner 3y ago

Really interesting post, thank you. I looked at the linked page, and had a really hard time figuring out what this, well, is, or how it’s supposed to work. It sounds to me like some of my naive initial reservations are impediments to actual use. 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.

allenu 3y ago

I remember trying it at PAX and was disappointed the effect didn't feel that strong to me either. I almost felt like something was broken or not calibrated since I could sense some 3D-ness, but it didn't jump out as truly 3D. 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.

jgennis 3y ago
I believe we tuned the interpupillary distance (IPD) down a bit for the demos at PAX. The IPD is a software setting that changes how far apart the two stereo images are drawn from. If it's set to a distance larger than the actual distance between your eyes then you'll perceive it as very strange (each eye seeing a different thing that your brain can't unify), and it will be very uncomfortable. If the IPD setting is set to a distance less than the actual distance between your eyes then you won't perceive as much depth when looking at it, but it's still fairly comfortable. The extreme version of this is just looking at normal monoscopic images (e.g. watching a movie) - perfectly comfortable, but no depth perceived from it. 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.
- allenu 3y ago
  Thank you for the explanation. If I get another chance, I'll give it another try with that in mind.