Tilt Five’s augmented reality glasses being used to play a game on a holographic tabletop
utility in less-exciting ways. It’s almost like we’re going into this phase with the smartphone, where there were a couple of killer apps—a thousand songs in your pocket, the internet in your pocket—and I think for AR, there’s going to be utilities like that that’re really going to drive home the mass market adoption. When will we begin seeing widespread adoption of AR technology?
I think it’s going to take a good part of a decade because there are some really tough challenges. It’s kind of like the early days of home computers. Home computers were touted as likely to completely change the way you do everything, but really it broke down into a couple of applications. Games were one of those, and super popular. Then it was the spreadsheet, and the word processor was the other really killer app. And so, I think we’re going to
hear a lot of hype around “it’s going to completely change the way we do everything in our life,” but it’s really going to take a decade or more for that to happen. Do any companies have a proprietary edge in AR that inspires you or that you particularly appreciate?
I think Microsoft has been leading the charge in this space for quite some time. Several years ago, they came out with their press releases—they were going to do the HoloLens. It was, in my opinion, very hype-y, and it was oversold, but they quickly realized the limitations of the technology they created. They focused on professional-use cases for their system, and they’re getting a lot of traction in that. They found a place for the current state of the technology, and they’ve been keeping it very realistic up to this point about what the technology can do and just
incrementally improving on it. The Kickstarter campaign was a great success. So what’s next for Tilt Five?
We’ve been working overtime with game developers and making sure we have a content pipeline—more than just launch titles, but that we have a constant cadence after we launch. And so our objective is to start off with a pretty modest number of units, learn from that and just keep growing. We’re looking at 2021 as our year to start pushing really hard to see if we can get this mass market product.
“AR is going to arrive because of companies that find a really strong niche and then incrementally improve.”
Final thoughts?
My stance is AR is going to arrive because of companies that find a really strong niche and then incrementally improve. Companies like Magic Leap come to mind [that have] taken billions of dollars and kind of fallen flat. It’s really hard when you try to do everything at once.
Jeri Ellsworth
january 2020 | luckbox
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