3 ms·

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

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.
- moron4hire 3y ago
  While it's good that you acknowledge the limitations and don't lie about things, at the same time, I'm getting anxious feelings from realizing you're also not telling me I'm completely off-base. I really wanted to love Tilt5, both because of your background and because it's not an ad-riddled megacorp backing it. And I'm an XR maximalist--VR and AR have been the focus of my career for the last 7, 8 years. But at this point, for most of the things I could do with T5, I'd have a better experience mounting a projector on my ceiling. I just... I don't know. I don't understand why you ever released this product. It wreaks of "yet another naive startup got ripped off by a some factory in China". I saw the posts about the difficulties you all had with getting the manufacturing right. And this is a common thread from everyone I've ever talked to who off-shores manufacturing. It's just frustrating that nobody in the startup consumer electronics space seems to be paying attention to any of the other consumer electronics startups. Was it a case of hubris? "Yes, but we are special and this won't happen to us?" On the controllers, I'd almost rather have a nose pointer and a small, hand-held clicker button. I actually have several already: they are basically Bluetooth keyboards that have a single button that sends the Enter or Space key. I wish I had many more options for pads. They don't seem like the expensive part of the BOM. IDK, maybe I'm underestimating the cost of bonding retro reflective paint to cardboard. But it seems silly to have to choose between pad sizes while purchasing. Just give both the small and large size pads. I got the large one and it's really too large for single-person use. I also don't have a table that fits it. My coffee table is long enough, but not wide enough. My dinner table is wide enough, but way too long. Not a lot of square tables out there. Better yet, be able to support multiple pads at the same time and create a system for mounting pads on the wall. I could see creating a desk setup where I have the desk top and the wall behind the desk as retro reflector pads. It'd make my whole desk into a stereo tank. Get rid of my monitors completely and not be strained trying to where a tyoical VR headset all day. I'd probably get more use out of a ridiculously large pad that I could setup against the wall in my living room than the current, awkwardly-sized pad that I basically have to use on my floor. And I'd immediately stop putting any effort into plugging multiple devices into a single PC. It's a hack that fixes things only on paper. Where am I going to put this PC so that all the players can sit around the board and not sweep their drinks off the table or yank the cable out? Who even has a PC powerful enough to run that many independent views (2 per person!) but XR enthusiasts like me who already have other, much more capable devices?
gumby 3y ago
> 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) This was a tough call. Originally we shot 100% of the CastAR video through the glasses and it worked great, but didn't really explain the 3D "pop". So in our second pitch video we sometimes allowed a small amount of synthetic image beyond the edge of the display which gave people a better clue as to the 3D nature of the image, but also for some people did overpromise. Because of that I always look for this in T5 videos and in general I think they don't drift any or only a little, but it's not like I have seen them all. Also note that the T5 board can tilt up at the end (don't know if this is released) so you actually can look above the tabletop and see things, though again, I don't know if this has been demoed in any videos (I'm sure it's been demoed at some conferences). Deciding to compose the image rather than shoot through the glasses can also be misleading, but for various technical reasons shooting through the glasses is also negatively misleading because the camera and the eye don't work the same (among other things the image is brighter in your eye). There's no perfect answer, but I think Jer and the rest of the team do want to get this right. At the end of the day it's an arcade and tabletop game system, not a AAA gaming rig, and doesn't try to be the latter. Perhaps they should make that more clear. I actually plan to use it in my current work for looking at CFD* video as a group (each of us with a headset) because we can walk around the table, lean in, and point things out to each other. I also like to put the game board on the wall BTW! * computational fluid dynamics -- analyzing plume performance in the atmosphere
nocoiner 3y ago
Also, no support at all for Mac OS or iOS seems like a deal killer at the price point. Maybe it’s just the circles I run with, but I think it would actually be pretty unlikely to select a group of (say) three friends chosen at random and have each of them have use daily a Windows laptop or an Android device. For instance I have my gaming desktop and work laptop (both Windows), but I doubt I can install the software on the laptop and I’m not running a cable from the desktop. And for me, 100% of family members and 90% of friends, no joy on the android device front.
- dagmx 3y ago
  In theory, you can plug in 4 to a single PC. So at least only one of you would need the computing end of it.

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.

moron4hire 3y ago
While it's good that you acknowledge the limitations and don't lie about things, at the same time, I'm getting anxious feelings from realizing you're also not telling me I'm completely off-base. I really wanted to love Tilt5, both because of your background and because it's not an ad-riddled megacorp backing it. And I'm an XR maximalist--VR and AR have been the focus of my career for the last 7, 8 years. But at this point, for most of the things I could do with T5, I'd have a better experience mounting a projector on my ceiling. I just... I don't know. I don't understand why you ever released this product. It wreaks of "yet another naive startup got ripped off by a some factory in China". I saw the posts about the difficulties you all had with getting the manufacturing right. And this is a common thread from everyone I've ever talked to who off-shores manufacturing. It's just frustrating that nobody in the startup consumer electronics space seems to be paying attention to any of the other consumer electronics startups. Was it a case of hubris? "Yes, but we are special and this won't happen to us?" On the controllers, I'd almost rather have a nose pointer and a small, hand-held clicker button. I actually have several already: they are basically Bluetooth keyboards that have a single button that sends the Enter or Space key. I wish I had many more options for pads. They don't seem like the expensive part of the BOM. IDK, maybe I'm underestimating the cost of bonding retro reflective paint to cardboard. But it seems silly to have to choose between pad sizes while purchasing. Just give both the small and large size pads. I got the large one and it's really too large for single-person use. I also don't have a table that fits it. My coffee table is long enough, but not wide enough. My dinner table is wide enough, but way too long. Not a lot of square tables out there. Better yet, be able to support multiple pads at the same time and create a system for mounting pads on the wall. I could see creating a desk setup where I have the desk top and the wall behind the desk as retro reflector pads. It'd make my whole desk into a stereo tank. Get rid of my monitors completely and not be strained trying to where a tyoical VR headset all day. I'd probably get more use out of a ridiculously large pad that I could setup against the wall in my living room than the current, awkwardly-sized pad that I basically have to use on my floor. And I'd immediately stop putting any effort into plugging multiple devices into a single PC. It's a hack that fixes things only on paper. Where am I going to put this PC so that all the players can sit around the board and not sweep their drinks off the table or yank the cable out? Who even has a PC powerful enough to run that many independent views (2 per person!) but XR enthusiasts like me who already have other, much more capable devices?

gumby 3y ago

> 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) This was a tough call. Originally we shot 100% of the CastAR video through the glasses and it worked great, but didn't really explain the 3D "pop". So in our second pitch video we sometimes allowed a small amount of synthetic image beyond the edge of the display which gave people a better clue as to the 3D nature of the image, but also for some people did overpromise. Because of that I always look for this in T5 videos and in general I think they don't drift any or only a little, but it's not like I have seen them all. Also note that the T5 board can tilt up at the end (don't know if this is released) so you actually can look above the tabletop and see things, though again, I don't know if this has been demoed in any videos (I'm sure it's been demoed at some conferences). Deciding to compose the image rather than shoot through the glasses can also be misleading, but for various technical reasons shooting through the glasses is also negatively misleading because the camera and the eye don't work the same (among other things the image is brighter in your eye). There's no perfect answer, but I think Jer and the rest of the team do want to get this right. At the end of the day it's an arcade and tabletop game system, not a AAA gaming rig, and doesn't try to be the latter. Perhaps they should make that more clear. I actually plan to use it in my current work for looking at CFD* video as a group (each of us with a headset) because we can walk around the table, lean in, and point things out to each other. I also like to put the game board on the wall BTW! * computational fluid dynamics -- analyzing plume performance in the atmosphere

nocoiner 3y ago

Also, no support at all for Mac OS or iOS seems like a deal killer at the price point. Maybe it’s just the circles I run with, but I think it would actually be pretty unlikely to select a group of (say) three friends chosen at random and have each of them have use daily a Windows laptop or an Android device. For instance I have my gaming desktop and work laptop (both Windows), but I doubt I can install the software on the laptop and I’m not running a cable from the desktop. And for me, 100% of family members and 90% of friends, no joy on the android device front.

dagmx 3y ago
In theory, you can plug in 4 to a single PC. So at least only one of you would need the computing end of it.