Weeks of fundraising on Kickstarter remain for tabletop AR project Tilt Five but they’ve already surpassed some notable milestones.
The project ends fundraising on Oct. 28 with a $299 pledge promising a pair of lightweight wide field of view AR glasses that work with a tabletop board. Tilt Five promises a three-pack of glasses for an $879 pledge, and neither of these prices include the processing computer(s) needed to draw the augmentations you can see through the glasses. Tilt Five says their hardware supports “phone, tablet, or PC” with delivery planned for mid-2020.
The project cleared its $450,000 goal in less than 24 hours and recently eclipsed the amount raised in 2013 by Tilt Five’s predecessor — CastAR. That original project raised $1,052,110 from 3,863 backers and never ultimately delivered. They did, however, offer refunds. The new project is backed by 2,118 accounts at the time of this writing and those pledges already funded the next generation Tilt Five product past the amount from 2013, with $1,075,581 raised.
“My biggest mistake was to not believe in my ability to be CEO,” Tilt Five co-founder and CEO Jeri Ellsworth wrote to me of her time at CastAR. “We may have cracked all of the things that’s keeping AR from going mass market.”
As we reported previously, hardware Kickstarters often face challenges and the risk can be higher due to more expensive support levels. The Tilt Five project page states they’ve done “extensive prototyping” as well as “multiple pilot runs” and its “risks” section on the Kickstarter page says they “promise to be fully transparent about any issues that come up, and we’ll do our best to address and solve them quickly.”
