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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 t

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?

jgennis 3y ago
First, let me set your mind at ease by telling you that you're completely, 100% off-base. Just in general. Very off-base. :) > I wish I had many more options for pads. Yup, we've heard this a lot, and it's definitely something we're looking to address. It is possible to lay down additional retroreflective material to get a larger viewable area. Folks in our discord can likely give you some tips if you're interested. > 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 didn't mean to imply at all that we got ripped off by a factory. Getting manufacturing right is on us. We had an issue that we didn't catch, and some people got shipped glasses that defocused. We've done our best to do right by them and repair or replace those glasses. We released the product because we believe that despite some imperfections, doing AR like we do it is way more compelling than any other way possible today for certain use cases. We want to enable people to do cool things and enjoy this product, while we learn from how they use it so we can improve on it. I think we've improved it a lot already, and will continue to do so going forward (that was the point I was going for in my first reply). Currently, doing XR hardware is all about trade-offs. Designing just the display system involves significant trade-offs between price, weight, brightness, field of view, vergence-accommodation conflict (eye strain / comfort), image resolution, eye box size (accommodating different face shapes & look-directions), depth of field (what range of distances are virtual objects in-focus across), latency, and power consumption just to name a few. Our trade-offs are pretty unique in the industry, and we've struggled a bit with how best to communicate about them to different audiences. Basically, we give up the ability to draw virtual objects anywhere, relying on the retroreflector, and in exchange we get to make a pair of glasses that are light weight, bright, in focus for up-close objects, have a wide field of view up-close, don't cause eye-strain, have a large eye box, are translucent with minimal dimming of the real-world, all for a non-astronomical price. For clarity, the "up-close" qualifier for the "in focus" is a feature - most headsets are focused at infinite distance and close objects will be improperly focused. The "up-close" qualifier for the "field of view" is a limitation of the gameboard, assuming additional retroreflector isn't added. On top of that, afaik, we're the only company looking to enable local multiplayer experiences for AR. There's something pretty special about interacting face-to-face with other people that are seeing the same things-that-aren't-there as you. It helps with the suspension of disbelieve in sort of a unique way. I know you said that we should give up on this so we don't catch everyone's computers on fire, but 4 pairs of our glasses have fewer pixels than a 4K display, and because we do the 180 Hz image stabilization on the headset, the PC only needs to hit 60 fps for smooth animations. We tend not to be entirely pixel-limited in the rendering, but as we optimize more that's the limit we'll approach. Anyhoo, hopefully that wasn't too infomercial-ish, but that's some semblance of what excited me about this when I first met Jeri all those years ago, and it's what still excites me (and I think everyone at Tilt Five) about it today. And that, ultimately, is why we made the product. Maybe that's the sort of answer you were looking for? Feel free to tell me I'm completely off-base ;)

jgennis 3y ago

First, let me set your mind at ease by telling you that you're completely, 100% off-base. Just in general. Very off-base. :) > I wish I had many more options for pads. Yup, we've heard this a lot, and it's definitely something we're looking to address. It is possible to lay down additional retroreflective material to get a larger viewable area. Folks in our discord can likely give you some tips if you're interested. > 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 didn't mean to imply at all that we got ripped off by a factory. Getting manufacturing right is on us. We had an issue that we didn't catch, and some people got shipped glasses that defocused. We've done our best to do right by them and repair or replace those glasses. We released the product because we believe that despite some imperfections, doing AR like we do it is way more compelling than any other way possible today for certain use cases. We want to enable people to do cool things and enjoy this product, while we learn from how they use it so we can improve on it. I think we've improved it a lot already, and will continue to do so going forward (that was the point I was going for in my first reply). Currently, doing XR hardware is all about trade-offs. Designing just the display system involves significant trade-offs between price, weight, brightness, field of view, vergence-accommodation conflict (eye strain / comfort), image resolution, eye box size (accommodating different face shapes & look-directions), depth of field (what range of distances are virtual objects in-focus across), latency, and power consumption just to name a few. Our trade-offs are pretty unique in the industry, and we've struggled a bit with how best to communicate about them to different audiences. Basically, we give up the ability to draw virtual objects anywhere, relying on the retroreflector, and in exchange we get to make a pair of glasses that are light weight, bright, in focus for up-close objects, have a wide field of view up-close, don't cause eye-strain, have a large eye box, are translucent with minimal dimming of the real-world, all for a non-astronomical price. For clarity, the "up-close" qualifier for the "in focus" is a feature - most headsets are focused at infinite distance and close objects will be improperly focused. The "up-close" qualifier for the "field of view" is a limitation of the gameboard, assuming additional retroreflector isn't added. On top of that, afaik, we're the only company looking to enable local multiplayer experiences for AR. There's something pretty special about interacting face-to-face with other people that are seeing the same things-that-aren't-there as you. It helps with the suspension of disbelieve in sort of a unique way. I know you said that we should give up on this so we don't catch everyone's computers on fire, but 4 pairs of our glasses have fewer pixels than a 4K display, and because we do the 180 Hz image stabilization on the headset, the PC only needs to hit 60 fps for smooth animations. We tend not to be entirely pixel-limited in the rendering, but as we optimize more that's the limit we'll approach. Anyhoo, hopefully that wasn't too infomercial-ish, but that's some semblance of what excited me about this when I first met Jeri all those years ago, and it's what still excites me (and I think everyone at Tilt Five) about it today. And that, ultimately, is why we made the product. Maybe that's the sort of answer you were looking for? Feel free to tell me I'm completely off-base ;)