31–40 of 42 posts
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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. Unt…
I think that for VR, the trick is to stick to experiences where your POV matches your meat-space position. Trying to shoehorn the conventions of flat-panel games into 3d VR either requires a lot of increasingly complex sim stuff or is just always gonna give you that mismatch between what you see and what you feel.
In that sense, I agree that AR is probably a lot more doable if you intend to be walking/running around.
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.
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.
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…
If you turn your head fast you'll see black at the edges where it's not caught up
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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…
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…
But a software game has many other possible mechanics that don’t work with a physical plastic board and pegs, so more likely people will just modify the game so that seeing someone’s hand motions doesn’t reveal hidden state.
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.
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.
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?
As others have said, that is probably not the best use of Tilt-5's technology. No matter how you move your head, it is still 1280x768 pixels spread over 110 degrees. Doing a little math, that is only about 13 pixels per degree or 4.5 arcminute/pixel. Typical VR headsets are about 30 pixels/degree (2-arcminutes per pixel. For optical text reading like with a computer monitor, I consider 40 pixels/degree (1.5arcminutes…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
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...