Tilt Five’s tabletop AR glasses system is on sale for a limited time.
The bundle for two players is priced $389, roughly 40 percent off its typical price, though you’ll need a high-powered Android phone or a PC to drive the AR glasses.
A single headset is discounted to $249 with game board, glasses, wand, kickstand, cleaning cloth, USB cable and USB Type-C to A adapter. 3 pairs of glasses are priced $539 for the sale and, with a decently powerful enough gaming PC, you could conceivably run all three glasses from a single computer.
Tilt Five is based on Jeri Ellsworth technology’s she exfiltrated more than a decade ago from Valve. It features an innovative approach to AR that works within current constraints to provide wide field of view visuals centered above and below a game board. The startup leans into board game replacement or augmentation where its predecessor, CastAR, lost footing trying to do too many different things.
We’ve been impressed by Tilt Five’s effort, though the startup likely still needs a massive funding injection to lure in development partners, reach store shelves, build a second generation and keep pace with the current rate of investment by tech giants like Apple, Meta, and Google. A partner like Nintendo, for example, could provide the missing content for Tilt Five’s platform while the hardware would give the giant exactly the sort of differentiated low-cost gaming experience it sells by the millions.
Right now, we can’t recommend Tilt Five as either a gaming or development platform partially because we lack significant time with the system, but like Meta cutting prices off Quest 2, this is still a steep discount for a unique technology that might interest curious hobbyists or experimental developers interested in exploring a new way of expressing or enjoying their content with AR.
In fact, the way AR content is centered around Tilt Five’s board is similar to the way Apple Vision Pro sometimes centers content in SharePlay. When viewed that way, an enterprising developer using multiple Tilt Five glasses from a single PC in the same room could affordably test out a multiplayer gaming idea that might translate to other headsets.
We’ll be curious to see what happens with Tilt Five over the course of the year and hope an investor or buyer like Nintendo can help the startup execute its vision for around-the-table shared multiplayer AR gaming.
