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Concept: Tilt Five is an entertainment system that uses augmented reality (AR) glasses, a game board, and a wand controller to engage players in tabletop and video games in 3D holographic environments. “Beyond entertainment, the technology is perfectly suited to do true 3D visualization for everything from education to health care,” says ten Cate.

Inspiration: One common question ten Cate gets is whether Tilt Five’s tech will allow people to play the holographic chess game from the original 1977 Star Wars film. Absolutely, he says. “With this type of AR, we can draw family and friends to the table for game nights in a whole new way, even when your fellow players are at different tables, in other cities.”

Stats: Tilt Five is located in San Jose, California, and has 14 employees and four contract workers. In October 2019, the company completed the largest-ever crowdsourcing campaign for an augmented reality product, raising $1.7 million, and followed it with a $7.5 million Series A in summer 2020. The technology was conceived by inventor Jeri Ellsworth in 2012 while she was at gaming company Valve Software. Tilt Five has begun manufacturing, and the glasses will be available to all in summer 2021.

Bottom Line: Tilt Five’s competitive advantage boils down to its proprietary technology, resulting in a more affordable, comfortable (lighter) headset that also happens to deliver a superior viewing experience, according to ten Cate. “Nearly all of the previous developments in AR have been near-eye projection headsets that have poor brightness and a limited field of view,” he notes. “Our glasses are the first to use tiny projectors that beam video images (left- and right-eye images) to the table. A large, foldout game board coated with a ‘retroreflective’ surface reflects those images directly back to your glasses and into your eyes, no matter where you are sitting or standing. This creates a 3D, stereoscopic hologram on the board; it is the brightest and most vivid 3D AR experience the market has seen to date.”

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