Tilt Five - First Impression
18 January 2022Do you remember the PlayStation 2? I know, I know, you want to hear about Tilt5 - bear with me. So, do you remember? A console that included various versions of Grand Theft Auto, Final Fantasy, Metal Gear Solid, and Tekken? The games were already great, and many of us have fond memories of them. Now, what if you played those games again today on a display that was so 3-dimensional it seemed like you would fall into it if you got too close?
More than 7 years ago, I backed a product called “CastAR” via Kickstarter. The promise was simple - augmented reality glasses focused on tabletop gaming which could be lightweight and multiplayer because it projected onto a special surface instead of trying to beam directly into your eyes. The special surface - retroreflective material - meant that each player would see what their own glasses sent rather than what anyone else saw. For a number of reasons, CastAR eventually had to refund its backers and shut down. However, in a great comeback story the founder was able to regain most of the tech and start a new company with the same goal: Tilt Five.
Yesterday, I finally got my glasses in the mail.
Packaging
Personally I just wanted a chance to play around with the technology, so I had only opted to back the “LE kit” - a standard gameboard and glasses, no frills or colors. This turned out to work well for me, as unforeseen delays meant the “XE kits” (bigger gameboards) had to be delayed temporarily.
I’m assuming that my LE kit was “pretty standard”, but they still found a way to throw in a cool little cleaning cloth for the glasses.
One thing worth noting: the wand controller does not come with batteries. It’s a small detail, and probably has to do with how shipping worked and such, but you’ll want a pair of “AA” size batteries on hand before you start trying to play anything.
Setup
As far as setup goes, the paper instructions you can see in my pictures are a bit like “errata”. Nothing major, just explaining how to use the USB-A to USB-C converter and a few other details. The rest of the instructions are actually visible through Tilt Five’s website, but as the official release of their SDK is a few weeks away I’m respecting their request to not share the direct URL. The device really is plug-and-play once the drivers are installed. The USB cable connects to the glasses snugly due to a small tab built into the cable and its corresponding small slot in the glasses frames. It can feel a little limiting to only have 5 feet or so of cord to play with, but as T5 ships more devices there will certainly be more knowledge around what USB-C cables can be successfully used. I personally tried a random 10-foot USB-C cord I had lying around, and while the device is detected as connected via USB the T5 Control Panel software helpfully told me that the USB port wasn’t supported. (I wasn’t using a repeater or anything, so I expected something like that to happen.)
Glasses
Once the glasses were connected and recognized, I put them on. I already wear glasses, but since I’m near-sighted and planned to look at a board close to me, I didn’t bother using my prescription pair. (UPDATE: I originally said that wearing prescription glasses inside the T5 headset wasn’t feasible unless you really had to. Since then, I’ve found that the noseguard in the T5 comes off easily if you want it to. With that piece removed, wearing prescription glasses inside your headset is much more comfortable, and appears to work fine with my prescription glasses.) Compared to the weight of my prescription glasses, the T5 unit is only barely noticeable. The arms on it are surprisingly long, and while they are very firm near the hinge (likely due to electronics), they are quite flexible towards the ends. This has to be intentional, as the arc both arms describe wouldn’t make it onto most heads unless you could bend the ends to put them on. Despite needing to use leverage to put them on my head, don’t get the wrong idea - for me, the pressure they apply to my head seemed negligible. The upside is that you can look straight down and they remain glued to your face.
Game Board
With the glasses ready to go, I unfolded the gameboard. It is retroreflective on top, and has dots along the side for tracking purposes. The backing is very much like a standard board game - “Pictionary” is what came to mind, if you’ve ever played that one. The material itself seems decently rugged, and slightly rough to the touch. Based on what I’ve seen, you need to be careful when folding and unfolding the board because the material can pull away from its backing if you stress it the wrong way. This is common to board games with folding boards, so it’s likely that differently made third-party boards will be manufactured and sold if T5 succeeds.
Software
It was time to boot up some software! The official SDK won’t released for at least a few more weeks, so the beta SDK is in use still. It provides three demos: a wand demo, an air traffice controller demo, and a marbles demo that I think originated back in the old CastAR days. I also downloaded a demo called DX266, which I found out about originally through T5’s official Discord. (Credit to spacedog for this demo, it’s one of the only two free offerings available at launch!)
The wand demo is fairly vanilla, just a model of the wand on a grid which you can mess around with. The air traffic control is more interesting, although it’s a true demo instead of a game. By that, I mean that you can move around and zoom in/out to demonstrate a lot of the potential this platform has. You don’t have any real objectives or scores for anything, though. The marbles demo is actually a game, and a pretty fun glimpse into what we can expect from other developers. In it, you move a marble around a table while picking up coins. However, the scenery here has a lot more care put into it and you can really get a feel for having things behind your focal point, or even in front of it. There are arches you want to put your hand through (I did) and columns or spires you just want to reach out and grab (I tried that too). When a hot air balloon “above” the playing field popped into view for the first time, I actually ducked away from it because it appeared to be so close that it’s startling. I handed the glasses over to my unsuspecting wife, and she had a similar reaction.
Scenery in the marbles demo shows off a few more unexpected things, too. When you fall off an edge, generally it puts your marble back onto the board pretty quickly. Sometimes you just fall for what feels like forever, though. It’s only a second or two of real-time difference, but when you are looking “down” - even looking down at an angle instead of straight down - you really “feel” that you’re skydiving and start to worry about what happens if you don’t reset before you meet the ground slowly rising to meet you! Further, your head position actually matters. Those hot air balloons that startled me before? Next time, I just stood up and looked over them! When my wife wanted to know what a particular piece of text said, she really did duck down and look under some of the scenery so she could read it.
Perspective
While playing with my marble, I wanted to see how close I could get to the board and what happened when I got “too close”. The answer is that you can actually get to within a few inches of the board, measured top-down, before the glasses shut off the projectors. Using the wand controller as a measuring stick you can basically get your nose to the bottom of the “stick” portion of the wand, which is about halfway down. Even that close up, however, you really don’t lose resolution or focus. The board does display a slight speckle when you examine it very closely. It’s similar to… oh, I know! If you’ve ever tried getting close to a CRT TV so you can examine the RGB dots, you also generally notice a fine layer of dust collected due to the static electricity. Up close, the board does not show any pixels but it does feel like the fine layer of dust is present. That’s probably either the light scattering in ways I can detect or something about the particular retroreflective mix that T5 went with, I’m not sure which.
However, I had to move on from marbles sometime. That left spacedog’s demo, which has a relatively fixed length of time but allows you freedom to play with its pieces during that time. Firstly, it was fun to find out that the board appeared to have an orientation. By that, I mean that when I started the demo it was displaying at a 90 degree angle from me on the board. In 2-dimensional terms, my “right” was the demo’s “down”. Physically rotating the board 90 degrees fixed this, and the demo was then scrolling towards me. I wasn’t able to determine if this was due to spacedog’s programming or something T5 inherently adjusted for, but it was cool either way! DX266 shows a lot of visualizations of shapes and patterns, allowing you to move, rotate, and drag them around the landscape in time to the background music. Even wireframe shapes are really enthralling in true 3D, and even more so when you can control the zoom via controller instead of relying on your head tracking. Some of the visualizations take up your whole field of vision, and it’s a real treat for the senses. If the marbles demo is about perspective, I think DX266 is really exploring what 3D can do when there’s no background to provide depth measurements. It succeeds surprisingly well at that, and also caused my wife to panic a bit after she finished - she looked at the silvery surface of the board and exclaimed, “Wait, it’s not a black surface! How are they displaying black?!?” (The Discord has asked that question, and as it turns out there are some human eye mechanics that “fill in” blacks if conditions are just right. T5 falls within those conditions!)
One thing I investigated a bit across both marbles and DX266 was how far away a bystander without a headset needs to be before your image isn’t visible to them. This is also a function of the retroreflective material used, but as I only have the standard T5 board that’s what I used. The answer is that someone who is 45 degrees or more away from you doesn’t really see anything. If they are within 45 degrees of you they can see very faint images on the board, and if they are basically sitting in your lap they’ll be able to see most of what you do but at much lower light intensity. Again, this is only what a bystander sees. I can’t test this without another T5 headset, but I find T5’s claim of players not being able to see each other’s screens very plausible based on my experience.
Oh yes, and the board really can’t display “beyond” its edges, but it can appear to display “above” them quite handily. I know of no picture that could illustrate this well, but imagine for a moment you have a 3D model of the Eiffel Tower displayed on the board. As long as your perspective is within the board (whether zoomed out via software or just standing enough above the board) the entire Tower could be displayed with the true illusion of height. This is why “falling into” the board is noticeable in the marbles demo. However, if you tried to view that tower from the side of the board, as soon as you move part of it “off” the side of the board that portion will disappear from view. This is true of scrolling the object (as you would in a Real-Time Strategy game) and also true of moving your head the wrong way (as you might if trying to read a sign on the side of the hypothetical Tower). The former is easy to adjust to and not very noticeable because you expect the scene to change, while the latter is somewhat jarring and has to be experienced to make much sense.
The XE kit is going to have an ability to extend the gameboard vertically, so this bears watching when XE kits are shipped and someone besides me can check this out!
Sound
Since DX266 covers sound a bit more than the standard demos do, it’s worth talking about sound as a subject. The T5 glasses are excellent at providing ambience. Until you are sitting basically next to someone, you can’t hear the audio playing from their headset. However, as a player with the headset on I could hear everything perfectly. It wasn’t too soft, it wasn’t too loud, I just heard it and it seemed the right volume. I honestly never thought to investigate whether I could change the volume, which is something I do constantly when I’m wearing a PC gaming headset. It’s very possible that you could play with a T5 unit in a medium-sized room and have no one be aware of what you’re doing (via sound - of course they would see lights!).
Lighting
Across all demos, I intentionally played in a standard “family room” setup. No lights were directly overhead, but the room used standard indoor lighting and the TV was on as well. As a bystander I could occasionally catch reflected images of lights or the TV off the gameboard, but when wearing the headset I never saw any of that. A lower-lit room might improve the contrast of the game images (and therefore make the graphics seem “more high quality”), but I never felt like I needed to go turn some lights off to see anything I was investigating. Honestly, the instinct to lean in when something wasn’t quite legible was far stronger than any thoughts of lighting!
The glasses do enter a “dimmed” mode when the board can’t be tracked. My experience was that you need to be oriented roughly 90 degrees from the board laterally before the glasses would do this. Simply looking up from the board or glancing at the player next to you wouldn’t affect the display. My wife supplied that the glasses are a bit hard to look at from outside when at full brightness, but in their dimmed state they’re easily tolerable and it just looks a little weird that I have lights where my eyes normally are.
Controller
The wand controller is very lightweight, and somehow feels like the long black “stick” is much sturdier than the white “body” of the controller. This is probably actually true, as the stick houses electronics and lighting while the body is mostly empty unless you have the batteries inserted. Button travel is neither bad nor good, and targets more of a soft push rather than a “click” feel. There are 8 usable buttons as far as I can tell, counting the thumbstick (which can be clicked), two buttons just under the thumbstick, a 4-button “ABXY” setup familiar to gamers, and the trigger on the underside. The ABXY buttons are clearly meant to be used if the wand is turned sideways, as they rested near the heel of my hand when I held the wand with my forefinger on the trigger. Turning the controller sideways, I was impressed to find that it’s not terrible when used that way. I’m sure T5 would prefer that everyone take advantage of the ability to track and move objects instead, but it’s good to know that you can just use the wand as a gamepad if you wish.
Also, let me just call this one right now: people are going to use the wands as lightsabers, and they are going to break them doing it. :)
Wrap Up
Let’s return to my PlayStation 2 analogy. For those of you into technical specifications, my earlier comparison may not make much sense. For example, that console had a native output of 640x480 while the T5 is using 720p projectors. However, I’m really struggling to describe the experience any other way. It is notoriously difficult to capture through-the-lens footage with this device because no capture device is really quite like your own eyes. (I didn’t even try to do a capture, personally, as all I have is a cellphone instead of anything more complex.) If you are looking for the latest million-pixel beyond-human-comprehension resolution, this headset isn’t targeted at you and it’s likely you’ll be disappointed. If you want to sit around a table and play some games or view some cool stuff, however, the T5 device is very capable and tracks admirably. There are few pieces to lose, it re-uses well-known form factors for technology (glasses and handheld controllers), and all it asks you do differently compared to any board game is lay out a game board which is somewhat large.
It remains to be seen where exactly the Tilt Five catches on, whether with the intended “tabletop” audience or with some other use. However, there’s real utility here. Many of us, myself included, see potential in this setup which already is powerful enough for games but could easily be extended to more uses. More importantly, perhaps, there’s no other device I know of currently which will allow you to play an augmented reality 3D experience while also being able to grin across the table at those playing it with you. I’ll be watching eagerly for what comes next from Tilt Five, and enjoying my LE kit in the meantime.