Tilt Five: Campaign video true or fake?

[pylo]

Hi,

I was looking at the Kickstarter campaign of the Tilt Five, and I noticed something interesting in one of their animated gifs. The one I'm talking about is this:


What bothers me is that in this gif that's supposed to show how well their system works, there are too shots were the camera is panning left and right with the glasses affixed to it in a fixed relative position. In these shots, you can just see the gaming board outside the glasses frame, and even though you are not looking through the glass, you can still see the projected virtual gameboard content. These stills show what I mean.



So, is this possible? I mean, is that "okay" that the camera can see the virtual objects outside the glasses, or is this another faked demo? The latter would conclude that the campaign itself could be scam or at least pretend to be much closer to being market-ready than they really are.

[janoc]

It is neither faked nor a scam, I have seen this tech first hand in the previous incarnation as CastAR.

What you see is simply the consequence of how the system works - the glasses contain a miniature DLP projector that shines light on a retroreflective surface. That reflects it back where it came from - i.e. towards the glasses (and the camera!). That's why the camera sees the image outside of the glasses too - it is exactly aligned right in the path of the light. You could see the same with a naked eye if you looked carefully from the right direction.

The glasses themselves are only so that you can see a stereoscopic image, nothing more (i.e. the image isn't produced by some sort of an LCD). They originally used shutter glasses, I think they now use polarized instead but not 100% sure.

Another pointer that this is legit would be to look who is actually behind the company. If you don't know who Jeri Ellsworth is, then I strongly suggest that you google her up. 

Actually Mike has done a teardown of the early developer version of the CastAR glasses:


The current version is a lot improved since then but the basic idea is the same.

[pylo]

No, I didn't know Jeri, I got fixated on the credibility of that video But I understand now and looks legit. I also looked up Jeri on Wikipedia now, and indeed, she doesn't look like somebody who would do scams. Thanks for the pointers!

[janoc]

No, I didn't know Jeri, I got fixated on the credibility of that video But I understand now and looks legit. I also looked up Jeri on Wikipedia now, and indeed, she doesn't look like somebody who would do scams. Thanks for the pointers!

Among other thing, Jeri worked on this tech originally for Valve (the game company). Valve wasn't interested and fired them but let them have the IP. That's how CastAR came to be. Then CastAR got VCs involved and has gone belly up a bit later (a very candid post-mortem with Jeri is here: https://theamphour.com/394-jeri-ellsworth-and-the-demise-of-castar/ ). The original founders have managed to buy up the key assets at the liquidation auction and that's how Tilt Five got started ...

BTW, Jeri has also a fairly interesting Youtube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClTpDNIOtgfRkyT-AFGNWVw