Tag: castAR

Augmented reality headset maker, CastAR (formerly Technical Illusions), and which I’ve been following and reporting on in this blog, has apparently closed its doors.

The company first came to prominence when the system – designed to use a glasses-like headset to project holographic images onto a retro-reflective surface users could then interact with via a hand-held controller  – was shown at the 2013 Maker Faire in New York.

At that time, the idea was very much fledgling and more spirit gum, soldering, tape and wires than it was a commercial venture – but that was enough to convince the pair behind the system, Jeri Ellsworth and Rick Johnson they had a potential product on their hands, so they went ahead with a Kickstarter campaign to raise US $400,000 to start development in earnest – and ended up raising over a million.

The system, called CastAR due to its primary function of projecting images onto that retro-reflective surface, actually came about by accident. In 2012, Ellsworth was working on another project at Gabe Newall’s Valve when she accidentally found she could create holographic-like images on the surface.

The potential of the idea excited her and (then) fellow co-worker Johnson, so they started delving into the idea. Then, in February 2013, they were among a group of staff let go by the company – and in a generous move, Newall allowed them to take the IP for the CastAR system with them, even though almost the entire development up to that point had been made on Valve’s time and with Valve’s resources.

 

From here, the story does suffer the hiccups. The Kickstarter raised US $1 million, enough to fund development of an initial headset system, but it was not entirely what Ellsworth and Johnson were hoping it would be. There were delays,  funding seemed (from the outside) to be slow in coming in and delivery dates for the initial Kickstarter headset got pushed back, although there was sufficient for the company to establish operations, hire a CEO (initially David Henkel-Wallace), refine the headset design, develop games to run on it.

But the company kept doing the rounds of VR / AR shows and the like, garnering publicity, generating interest and towards the end 2015, secured US $15 million in funding. The majority of this came from Playground Global, co-founded by Andy Rubin of Android Inc. fame, and Rubin persuaded Ellsworth and Johnson to back to basics and design the system they wanted.

As a result, in 2016, the company announced a significant change in direction. The US $1 million raised via the Kickstarter was refunded, together with a promise all backers would receive a “consumer” version of the headset,  CastAR hired talent to open its own mixed reality studio in Salt Lake City and acquired entire Eat Sleep Play development team, responsible for the Twisted Metal series and God of War. All of this was done with the aim of developing a complete consumer package – headset, controllers, game surfaces and games – which would be low-cost and playable “right out of the box”.  2016 saw LucasArts chief Darrell Rodriguez take over as CEO, with former Disney executive Steve Parkis as its president and chief operating officer.

Now, according to an article appearing in Polygon on Monday, June 26th, and since widely circulated in the tech media, CastAR has closed its doors with up to 70 people being laid off. There has been no official statement on the matter from either CastAR – the corporate website continues to reference a consumer product launch in 2017, although it doesn’t appear to have been updated since around the start of the year – nor Playground Global, despite attempts by a number of outlets to secure a comment. However, the Polygon piece suggests the reason for the closure is Playground Global’s refusal to provide further funding for the venture after CastAR failed to obtain investment from other sources.

Following the story breaking, Polygon later updated their article to reflect sources stating that a small team has been retained by CastAR to oversee attempts to sell the company’s IP. But again, there has yet to be an official statement from CastAR.

This might be seen as a blow to the fortunes of AR. However, as innovative as CastAR was (and as much as I found their approach fascinating), the system took a markedly different approach to AR / MR than is the case with the likes of Qualcomm (see here) and others, simply by its reliance on a retro-reflective surface. While the latter is well suited to gaming, and the company tried to suggest it could have practical applications through their promotional videos, it still might have been seen as a limiting factor in the system’s broader appeal.

CastAR, formerly Technical Illusions, the company behind the augmented reality castAR headset with a VR capability and which I’ve been covering in this blog, has announced the completion of a US $15 million round of funding.

Former Valve employees  Jeri Ellsworth and Rick Johnson founded the company in 2013 after being let go by Valve – and given the blessings of Gabe Newell, Valve’s founder and Managing Director, to take the IP used within castAR with them.

Since then, they’ve been developing the headset with the aim of producing a low-cost, self-contained AR system initially aimed at games and entertainment, but with a wide range of other potential applications – including VR, through the addition of a clip-on that allows for wide field-of-view VR experiences.

The early stages of the company’s work was largely funded by a Kickstarter campaign in late 2013 which raised just over US $1 million. This provided sufficient capital to get the company running, albeit on the small scale, and in October 2014, they were able to start shipping the first of the Developer / Kickstarter backer kits whilst also relocating from Seattle, Washington, to Mountain View, California, a move overseen by the newly hired CEO, David Henkel-Wallace.

However, fulfilling the obligations of the Kickstarter campaign has been difficult – so far the company has only been able to produce and ship around 1/3 of the pledged headsets. The Series A round of funding, which has been chiefly backed by Playground Global, co-founded by Andy Rubin of Android Inc. fame, will enable the company to take on staff, complete its Kickstarter obligations and lay the foundations for the future.

The news of the investment round was announced to Kickstarter backers in a personal note from Jeri and Rick, which reaffirms their commitment to their original supporters, reading in part:

What does this mean for Kickstarter? Delivery! We remain committed, as we always have, to giving our Kickstarter backers a high quality product and experience. Of course with only nine people and an ambitious engineering plan, it clearly has taken us longer than we had planned, but among other things, this investment will make sure we complete the Kickstarter in the next several months.

We recognise every day that we would not be where we are at without the support of you, our backers. You believed in us when we put together a video showing a product of 90% hot glue, some friends using it, and some crude software. That support reassured us that we weren’t crazy, and it helped send investors the message that there is significant excitement for castAR.

The slightly ungainly – at least in its development form – headset uses projectors mounted on it to bounce light of a retro-reflective surface in an effect Ellsworth came across by accident, setting her with the initial idea for the system. The light from the projectors is delivered back to the wearer’s eyes through active-shutter glasses which also track the user’s position, allowing the projection to be updated in real-time.

Projections seen when wearing the headset appear as holographic elements directly in front of the user’s field of vision, which can then be manipulated via a “wand” hand controller.  Because the retro-reflective material bounces light back to its origin, multiple users can use the same surface simultaneously without experiencing any interference from other headset, allowing multiple headsets to be used in the same physical space for game play or other activities.

A key aim of the headset is to be affordable, ease-to-use system which users of all ages can immediate grasp conceptually and use with ease.

“When we say a consumer product, we mean a consumer price point,”  Henkel-Wallce told GamesIndustry.biz when discussing the funding announcement. “The Oculus headset is only a few hundred dollars but then you need a $1000 PC to run your games. That’s not a consumer product, that’s not something you’re giving to your kids.

“Our vision is that Christmas day Grandma has bought these for the kids, they tear open the paper, they open the box, they’re eight and ten years old, they put down the game board and within a minute they’re playing. That’s where we want to get to.”

It was this approach which attracted Playground Global’s interest, with Rubin stating, “I was really intrigued by [their] approach to tackling the problem of how to drive mainstream adoption of AR. They’re the only company I found to be simplifying the utility and application of augmented and virtual reality technology into a fun, accessible, and portable system that will wow kids and adults alike.”

The company’s change in name was also announced alongside of the funding news, and is seen as a natural step for the fledgling company, as Rick Johnson explained when writing to Kickstarter backers:

One observation we’ve made along the way is that people kept calling us “castAR” as a company name. We used the financing as an excuse to change our official company name to castAR.

The Series a funding round comes on top of an undisclosed seed round of funding for the company. Together these demonstrate that castAR is a viable investment concern, opening the door to additional round of investment in the future, if / when needed. As Henkel-Wallace informed Gamesindustry.biz, “This money really marks an inflection point from being just a raw start-up to actually allowing us to become a really fully functioning company.”

Congrats to Jeri, Rick, David and the team.

Sources

• CastAR secures $15m in funding – Rachel Weber, gamesindustry.biz
• A Message from Jeri and Rick – Jeri Ellsworth and Rick Johnson, via Kickstarter

I’ve been following the work of Technical Illusions, the creators of the castAR projected augmented reality headset with a VR capability, for some time now, although things have been quiet on the news front for a while. However, that’s starting to change.

The first item of news is that the company in the process of moving its operations from Seattle, Washington, to Mountain View, California.

The move is being overseen by the company’s new CEO, David Henkel-Wallace, who joined the company in June 2014. The move is in part to try to drive-up the company’s ability to hire hardware talent – they’ve found it hard to get hardware specialists in Seattle, where software rules the roost. It also puts them in the middle of “Nerdvana” – as Co-founder Jeri Ellsworth puts it, which could do much to raise their visibility in terms of inward investment opportunities.

As it is, the company numbers around a dozen full-time employees, including Henkel-Wallace, founders Ellsworth and Rick Johnson and CFO Paul Denton. Both Denton and Henkel-Wallace have considerable experience in building-up start-ups. There’s also Toby the cat, also listed as co-founder, and fulfilling the role of Senior Cat, with responsibilities for eating, sleeping, purring and lap-sitting.

The other major news for the company is that a year after their Kickstarter campaign, their initial developer kits are now ready, and will soon be shipping to those people who pre-ordered kit through the campaign. The new headsets have also been on show to the likes of Engadget and Venture Beat’s Gamesbeat, where Ellsworth talked to Dean Takahashi.

Ellsworth is the first to admit the new headsets are still some way short of a production-ready version, but they’ve still come a long way from even the 2nd prototype versions seen just seven  months ago.

The revised developer headset weighs-in at some 140 grams, and the company is aiming to get this down to around 80 grams in the production version. Included in that are two 120 Hz cameras with 135 degrees tracking, and 1,000 Hz gyro. The optics, now supplied by a Japanese company, deliver a resolution of 2,560-by-720, with every pixel addressable and capable of being resolved at a distances of between half a metre and 2 metres when using the retro-reflective system.

The headset is admittedly still nerdy-looking, resembling a pair of heavily framed sunglasses with a bulky silver mounting for the LEDs and cameras on top. However, Technical Illusions state that they opted to make the headset somewhat on the big / clunky side, as they weren’t sure how well all the tech would fit into it. They’re now confident that the package can be shrunk down to something which not only meets their target weight, but which is also more pleasing to the eye and closer to their conceptual look for production versions.

As well as the headset, the other major components of the system  – the interactive wand, the retro-reflective surface and the VR clip-on – have all been refined and improved. Work is still ongoing with the wand, which allows a user to manipulate virtual items projected by the headset onto the retro-reflective surface with “sub-millimetre accuracy”. Kits, when shipped, will also include Technical Illusions’s own game, mARbles, designed to demonstrate the gameplay capability of the system to developers.

So what is the market for the castAR? Ellsworth believes that games “will be king for a while”, and admits to looking forward to seeing flight simulators that use the castAR projection system, although she also notes other potential uses when talking to GamesBeat’s Takahashi.

A lot of people are going to get excited about tabletop collaborative experiences, where multiple people sit around a table and work in the same physical space. All the game characters are in the same space. We have a lot of companies approaching us that want to use it for visualization – architecture, things like that, where you can sit around and table and work in the same space.

Nor do users necessarily need to be in the same physical space, in order to engage with one another, as the company has demonstrated in a number of its videos.

In terms of practical applications, Technical Illusions have been working with medical experts to see how the castAR system might be used alongside MRI scans, the castAR system being use to build 3D holograms of scanned patients which can be examined by doctors and / or surgeons, helping them to build a more complete understanding of the patient’s condition.

How successful castAR is likely to be is hard to judge; the world is awash with excitement over VR that all things AR have been largely sidelined. Even the involvement of Google (and others) in Magic Wand hasn’t really done much to change that.

castAR is also somewhat different to other AR systems seen so far, potentially making it an oddball in the eyes of some media, although its potential to enter into the VR sphere through the VR clip-on may serve to generate wider interest. How big a footprint castAR might actually make in the VR world is hard to judge; a key here might be in whether it can be made compatible with games being specifically developed for Rift-type hardware.

So far, the company has managed to achieve a lot while remaining relatively low-profile. Their emphasis for the foreseeable future is on building relationship with developers and getting content integrated into the system as the hardware itself continues to mature towards the desired consumer format.

Even so, if the company is to make its mark, it is liable to need the support of investors – and the move to Mountain View is, as noted by Technical Illusions themselves, perhaps as much about that as putting them more readily at the hub of available expertise. As such, it’ll be interesting to see where the move leads.

Related Links

• Technical Illusions Website
• castAR bets big on its augmented reality hardware with move to Silicon Valley – Engadget
• Valve spinoff Technical Illusions shows off its Google Glass competitor – GamesBeat

Back in May 2013, and courtesy of The Verge,  I was able to report on the development of castAR, an Augmented Reality headset, a prototype of which made an appearance at the May 2013 Maker Faire in New York.

The project, initially started by Jeri Ellsworth and colleague Rick Johnson while both were employed by Valve, came about by accident. However, development work in-house at Valve came to an end in February 2013 when both Ellsworth and Johnson were let go by the company. But in a generous move, Gabe Newell, co-founder and Managing Director of Valve, gave them his blessings to take the idea and the associated IP with them.

As I reported back in May, convinced the idea had legs, Ellsworth and Johnson founded their own company, Technical Illusions, and have been hard at work developing things further.

The castAR system differs from the likes of Oculus Rift in that in its primary function is augmented reality, rather than immersive virtual reality. It projects images onto a retroreflective projector screen. A camera also built-in to the glasses  tracks the exact position of your head so that the software can adjust the 3D perspective in real-time. The result is a holographic-like projection of images and objects from the computer as 3D objects which you can move around and examine.

At the time of the May 2013 Maker Faire, the team had managed to put together a very rough-and-ready prototype of the system, and have since been working to further refine the technology and the idea. In September, they were back in New York for another Maker Faire, where they were awarded blue and red ribbons with a win of Editors and Educators Choice. Buoyed by this, the team set-out to move ahead with their planned Kickstarter project in order to secure funding which would allow the work to continue and would hopefully see the system further refined, including the creation of a software development kit which might in turn help with adoption of the system.

The Kickstarter launched on October 14th, 2103 together with a video expanding on the idea and their plans. They’d hoped to raise $400,000 in a one-month period to November 14th, 2013.

As of October 18th, over $500,000 had been pledged by more than 2,000 people.

Interaction with the virtual projections can be achieved through both the use of traditional games controllers and joysticks, or via a dedicated “magic wand”. The latter allows for a wide range of interactions, with Sean Hollister of The Verge using it to play a virtual game of Jenga. Other elements, such as an RFID grid and “bases” which can be attached to physical objects allows such objects to be used within the virtual projection, with movement of such objects interactively plotted, etc.

As with Oculus Rift, uses for the system are potentially huge. Not only could castAR be used for computer games and virtual worlds, it might equally be used for playing board games (with players sitting anywhere in the world), or for it to be used in diverse fields as research, data visualisation work, 3D design, virtual worlds and so on.

For those wishing to experience more of an immersive, Occulus-like virtual reality experience, such as when using castAR in a virtual environment like Second Life, Technical Illusions are developing what they call the “AR & VR Clip on”. This allows users to dispense with the retroreflective surfaces and experience images projected onto a pair of screens, the result matching that of the Oculus Rift.

Continue reading “castAR, the “Oculus competitor”, gains $500,000 in three days on Kickstarter” →