CppCast - Commodore 64 and Tilt Five AR

Episode Date: October 10, 2019

Rob and Jason are joined by Jeri Ellsworth the CEO of Tilt Five. Jeri and Jason first geek out about the Commodore 64 with Jeri telling her story of building the C64 Direct-to-TV. Then she tells us about her new companies product the Tilt Five AR headset which is built with the tabletop gamer in mind and has SDKs for C++ and Unity. Links C64 Direct-to-TV Tilt Five Kickstarter - Tilt Five: Holographic Tabletop Gaming Update 1 - Tilt Five SDK Sponsors Backtrace Announcing Visual Studio Extension - Integrated Crash Reporting in 5 Minutes JetBrains

Episode 218 of CppCast with guest Jerry Ellsworth, recorded October 10th, 2019. This episode of CppCast is sponsored by Backtrace, the only cross-platform crash reporting solution that automates the manual effort out of debugging. Get the context you need to resolve crashes in one interface for Linux, Windows, mobile, and gaming platforms. Check out their new Visual Studio extension for C++ and claim your free trial at backtrace.io slash cppcast. And by JetBrains, makers of smart IDEs to simplify your challenging tasks and automate the routine ones. Exclusively for CppCast, JetBrains is offering a 25% discount for a yearly individual license, new or update, on the C++ tool of your choice, CLine, ReSharper C++, or AppCode. Use the coupon code

JetBrains for CppCast during checkout at www.jetbrains.com. In this episode, we're joined by Jerry Ellsworth, the CEO of Tilt 5. Jerry first tells us her story of building the Commodore 64 direct-to-TV. Then Jerry tells us about the Tilt 5 AR headsets built for tabletop gaming. Welcome to episode 218 of CppCast, the first podcast for C++ developers by C++ developers. I'm your host, Rob Irving, joined by my co-host, Jason Turner. Jason, how are you doing today? I'm doing pretty well, Rob. It's been like five weeks since I had to travel to another country or something.

Yeah, I just finished some travel myself, But hopefully that was it for me this year. I'm looking forward to just staying here in North Carolina for the rest of the year, hopefully. Well, and I have Code Dive coming up, which I don't think we've really talked about the fact that I was going to be going there. Where is that one again? Wroclaw, Poland. Okay. Yeah, it's actually, it's a really cool conference. The registration is open right now. It's quote free. I mean, you have to pay a donation. My understanding is that, you know, just like a lot of meetups do this, right?

They'll charge like a dollar entry fee or something just so people don't sign up and then don't come. So it's like the equivalent of like $5 for a two-day conference. And it's hosted the equivalent of like $5 for a two day conference. Um, and it's hosted by Nokia. Yeah. Uh, and they, they always fly in a bunch of cool people.

What, uh, talk are you planning on getting or what talk are you giving? I'm sure it's, uh, set in stone by now. Um, C plus plus code smells,

I think. Okay. Awesome. Uh, okay. Oh, well at the top of your episode i like to read a piece of feedback uh this week we got a tweet from kevin boyd saying it took two years but i'm now completely caught up on cvpcast i now feel qualified to give it an itunes review and i saw you actually respond to this one jason saying uh that we expect a thorough review and he wrote back saying uh 200 hours

of podcasts and i still don't know what a monad is yeah it's a it's a great review and we refuse to try to explain what a monad is you can't do it it's it's a 218 episode joke pretty much at this point i don't know when it started actually but it was a long time ago it has been a while since we started talking about that i might shamefully admit that I think I almost understand what one is now. I still don't. Okay, that's good. Yeah. Okay.

Well, we'd love to hear your thoughts about the show. You can always reach out to us on Facebook, Twitter, or email us at feedback at cpcast.com. And don't forget to leave us a review on iTunes or subscribe on YouTube. Joining us today is Jerry Ellsworth. Jerry is an American entrepreneur and auto-didact computer chip designer and inventor. She gained fame in 2004 for creating a complete Commodore 64 system on a chip housed within a joystick called C64 Direct-to-TV. That computer and joystick ran 30 video games from the early 1980s and at peak sold over 70,000 units in a single day via the QVC shopping channel.

In September 2019, Jerry Ellsworth initiated a Kickstarter for a new device based on the same principles of the CastAR called Tilt 5. Jerry, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks. I love Autodidact. It's a fancy way for saying a high school dropout that taught themselves. Oh, is that what that is? You just a self-taught, in other words? Yeah. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be on this. I joke around the office that I'm good at the C+. I'm not really a programmer. I'm a chip designer. So feel free to beat me up along the way for being not a programmer. Well, before we talk about what you're currently doing, and maybe perhaps the fact that you're not a programmer, Well, before we talk about what you're currently doing, and maybe perhaps the fact

that you're not a programmer, we were just saying off air that I actually have one of these C64 DTV systems. And I guess if anyone's watching on YouTube, I can prove it. It is here. At 70,000 units in a single day, how many units did you end up selling total? I think they came close to a million units over the entire life, which was about two years. That was such an amazing project. So, you know, my career has been very odd. So I started my career dropping out of high school, getting into designing, building and racing cars in Oregon. Yeah, it was super fun, like these big V8-powered cars. And I did that for five years.

And then I opened a chain of retail computer stores in 1995 when you could just make tons and tons of money selling PCs to grandma and grandpa to get on to AOL. I'm being a little mean. I mean, everyone was getting on to personal computers then. It was a great time. But, you know, never went to school. And then in 2000, the whole computer store market imploded. And so I'm like, well, I've always done this hobby electronics thing. And, you know, when I was at the computer stores, I'd started working on these things called FPGAs, which are programmable logic chips that can emulate ASICs.

And so I'm like, I'm just going to like go to Silicon Valley and figure out how to bust into product design and chip design. So I just started going to all these different trade shows and meeting entrepreneurs. And eventually I kind of through pure brute force busted into doing chip design, you know, and fast forward forward a couple years after i got a reputation of doing like really good job at um at design um this toy company approached me to do this this toy and at that time i had never done a full custom chip before but you know that never stopped me before they just reached out to me like hey can you put the whole commodore 64 on a single chip i'm like yeah no problem i had no freaking clue how i was going to actually do it i had eight months to get it done um we assembled a little tiny team some programmers that knew uh like how to hack the old c64 code these games so that we could uh put menus on them and exit and and go back to the main menu and emulate all the disk stuff inside.

And we did it. It was a miracle. We almost lost the company millions of dollars because the the chip, like it took me so long to get the chip done that we came in like super hot. And the literally, we were doing a thing called a super hot lot where you know usually you design a chip you run one through the foundry you test it make sure it works and then you produce like millions of them like we had no time left because we were so far behind schedule so they just pushed all the wafers through like millions of dollars of wafers and uh i was sitting at home anxiously waiting to find out if it works and i got this angry call from a super angry um new yorker the president of this toy company that our chip didn't

work it's like oh shoot like oh i was kind of worried i thought i was gonna have to go hide in mexico you know from this angry guy but he's like you get on a Mexico, you know, from this angry guy. But he's like, you get on a plane tomorrow, you know, we have a ticket for you just get to China, figure out what's going on. And luckily for me, it was not my problem. It was the toy factory decided to cost reduce the design without telling me and they'd removed a bunch of components from the circuit board. And we quickly fixed it. And then, I'm sorry long-winded story getting to the viral part the 70 000 in one day um the programmers i was working with they really liked the old commodore 64 and so they wrote a couple video games they put it in a secret menu

and so if you wiggle the joystick in the right way when it's booting up, it drops into this secret menu. And so I, at the same time, I wrote up some instructions for them to include in the ROMs to explain how to take the screws out of the bottom of the joystick, solder wires onto it, put a keyboard and a disk drive onto it and be able to download and flash your own, put your own games into it. And so I was at the factory and we were debugging, you know, the production and I was at the factory and we were debugging the production. And I drop into the secret menu and one of the toy guys were there and he saw this menu. And he's like, what is that? And I'm like, oh, we just added a few extra things to the ROM.

And he's like, what? He's like, tell me now what you added to it. I'm like, oh, well, a couple games. There's a picture of us drinking beer with Jim Butterfield, this famous programmer. And they're like, oh, my God, we're in so much trouble. Like, one of the games was, like, you jump off of a cliff and you have to do these back dives and, like, crash your head into the rocks below and, like, kill yourself in the most dramatic way. They were pissed off. And these were all mask ROMs.

So, you know, flash ROMs, you flash them and you can reprogram these mask ROMs. They like burn a metal layer and they're like forever. And we're producing these things like thousands of them per hour. And they're going getting loaded into containers to go over to QVC. And they're like, you're done in the industry. Don't talk about this. And they're mad. So I go back, and the guy I was dating at the time,

I'm back in the United States, I'm like, oh, well, I just screwed myself over in the toy industry. And he's like, well, why don't we just leak the information out anyway? So he made this fake blog, Crest Doors Hacks, which is supposedly this guy that worked in the factory that likes to circuit bend and hack toys. And he's like, hey, I'm at the factory and I'm working on this really cool toy.

And then like the last blog post is like all of this detail of like the kind of Easter eggs that are inside. Wow. And this is 2003 or 2004. It was really cool because Slashdot was a thing back then and somehow it made it to slash dot and it just went viral. That has to be how I found out about it. Cause I've been reading slash dots since 96. Yeah.

Are you still reading it now? I still do actually go to slash dot every day. Yes. Wow. I haven't been there in years. Well, slash dot was the hotness and it just exploded. And then all of a sudden I'm getting phone calls from the toy executives like we're suing you.

Like we know this is you. And I'm like, I don't know. No, it wasn't me. And what was interesting is they decided to sell it through QVC, this home shopping network, which kind of caters to grandma and grandpa. Man, it's a lot of grandpa and grandpa analogies in this episode. But really is geared towards older folks. And so I was watching them like launch this thing live, and they have paid actors that go on there and describe the product and so this paid actor goes on and they're talking about like your grandkids come over and and you can get this and you just plug it into the tv and you can play video games and look at those colors

look at the colors and it was just like look at the colors like obviously it's a great selling tactic to someone that doesn't know anything about video games. Right. And in fact, the guy, the actor that was doing the demo didn't even know how to navigate the menu. So he would go into the first game, which was this really lame, I think it was part of California games, one of these older games. It was like bull riding. It's like the lamest game on the joystick. And he's like, this is so much fun. And he would like be trying to do bowl riding. And he would like last two seconds on the bowl and get bucked off and game over.

But anyway, because it went viral, they just like sold out in like a couple days, like 70,000 or something in one day. And QVC was like completely baffled. And they were calling the toy company like we just don't understand what's going on we've never seen a product do this before it's like we're only selling it in the united states but for some reason like 60 of them are going out worldwide and we just don't understand it we're so confused and like and if anyone's ever seen qvc those numbers that are kind of uh scrolling by at the top,

I always thought those were fake. But no, those were real. And I actually have a VHS recording. That was my only way to record back then. But a VHS recording of live QVC and those numbers going up at insanely high rates. I'm like, holy cow. I was supposed to get a back end on that product too but um it never came go go figure a royalty right so you just got paid a a flat fee for it paid up front

yeah and then i was supposed to get a royalty but i ended up getting screwed in the end but that's okay i would probably get some notoriety for it at the very least, I guess. That was important. It was an inflection point in my career. I went from kind of like scraping by and having to prove myself to like, like, here's this really amazing product. And I went on to do a ton of other stuff, like amazing stuff. I was just so honored to work at various places. I did rocket navigation systems and video compression ICs. Things ended up in TiVo.

I ended up at Valve Software. So, sorry. Anyway, that was a long story. I'm sorry I'm taking up your whole podcast. Although it does raise an interesting question for me personally, because today all of these... I mean, the market for these all-in-one joystick or whatever kind of you know mini console things they're all nintendo does it now everyone they're

effectively like a raspberry pi in a case running an emulator yeah and i know to people who are fans of the hardware that you design they're like no this is real implementation that's the only modern implementation of of one of these old systems that basically... Yeah. Like, how do you feel about this? Like the software emulation versus the like actual hardware reimplementation of it? I am so proud. So when the toy company approached me,

they had been trying to emulate the Commodore 64 in these Nintendo on a chip solutions out there, which there were a couple of these kind of all-in-one joystick video game things, but they were all emulated on kind of a clone of the Nintendo on a chip. Right. And so they were trying to do it and failing miserably. And so they're like, well, we're just going to have to find someone that can emulate the whole thing. It was such an amazing opportunity to make an ASIC

that was the entire Commodore 64 on a chip. So I implemented the 6502 processor, the VIC-II, which is the video interface. So you had to design this from scratch. You didn't grab, like, an existing implementation or something. No, none of it existed. Okay. So, yeah, it was really incredible because the toy industry works on such low margins. Like I was given a budget of $2 to do the, all the electronics. So I had to do the ASIC. I had to do all the, really small. So I couldn't just be, I've worked on projects where we had, we're using like 65 nanometer and you could just throw transistors at it and you didn't care about power budget.

And you could just sling, you could be sloppy with your Verilog or VHDL and just whatever. This one, I had to be super elegant with everything. So, um, and it took so long. We came in so close to the deadline that, um, I didn't have color video working on the system until like, uh, a couple of weeks before we taped out. And I was sending, uh, ECOs to the foundry to change metal layers. That's engineering change orders. Um, which is like super duper risky stuff to do. And I thank goodness for the folks at Atmel, which did our first design. They quickly recognized that I was not a chip designer by trade. And a couple of the guys just like worked intensely with me to make sure that, you know, I made it through all the back end processes without like screwing it up. If it wasn't for like their overtime and being generous,

I probably would have completely failed. But yeah, we didn't have color video until just like a week before. And it was a metal layer change to get color video in. So I, the programmers, I made an FPGA emulation, a circuit board with an FPGA emulating the whole thing. I sent it out to them, like, trust me, the color video is coming. Just trust me. Trust me. But along the way, we did two revisions of the chip, too. So the first one, I got to slip a couple extra things in.

But the second revision, which supported PAL video and some other Japanese NTSC, um, variants of video. Not the one I have when I look at the hacking forums on this. Oh yeah. The hackers love, love this thing. I think they're selling for like 150 or $200 on eBay now. It's amazing. That's an investment. Yeah. you might want to sell it um so the first chip um i added a bunch of extra features like you can do more colors it can do it has a full glitter in it so it's like an amiga glitter and we use that for like disc um emulation but you could also use it for graphics but when i got to revise the chip like i had a whole year to work on it instead of eight months. And so I just packed it full of all kinds of things.

So I was able to optimize the design down. It still fits in the same size, the same number of gates, but I was able to add things. I could make, I added an SD RAM controller, so I could do burst transfers. I put a cache into the 6502. So you could do cache line fills and fill the cache and run the processor at eight megahertz and execute things out of the cache. And I expanded the blitter. So it had transparency and, and arbitrary masking and it was super fun so and so now i get like it's been what i don't know 15 years

sounds like yeah almost every year i get like a random email from someone like hey i entered this european demo coding uh contest and i won first prize with your commodore d, wow. But it's such a... Democoders and the retro collector folks are a very fickle bunch. Love them. I'm a collector myself. But when I first made this thing, they were just like, fuck you, this is not a real

Commodore. We'll never embrace it. But then they rush out and they buy a bunch of them. And then the emulator guys are like, fuck you. We're never going to emulate your thing. It's not a true Commodore. And now it's completely emulated and people do all their development cross-platform. People have made the Ethernet adapters so they can download code to it and do regular debugging.

And it's pretty amazing what they've done with this little thing. It seems I'm actually I, I have like 250,000 of the chips sitting in my, my closet right now. Oh, wow. I don't know. I'm just thinking like, someday I should just make a circuit board, which is like the Commodore, like Raspberry Pi or something. I'm sorry, but I have to clarify, did you say 250 to a thousand or did you say 250,000? 250,000 on a bear die on sticky back film. Um, I kind of funny thing that happened. So this,

so this, um, this project, there's the main toy company, great relationship with them. They're the ones that were pissed off at me and then after we went viral and they sold a bazillion of these things they loved me and i did like another five or six projects with them um but they had some business arrangement with

some company out of canada that was somehow loosely uh associated with a company in uh england and that deal like fell apart like like the second year, and the toy company got stuck with all these chips. And so like, every year, they're like, Hey, do you want to buy these chips from us? And like, how much do you want for them? And they're like, Oh, how about $1 a piece? I'm like, Oh, putting $250,000 into like, worthless chunks of silicon. And so this just happened year after year. And I think I was even done. Yeah, I was completely done with them and moved on and they contact me like,

Hey, we still have these chips. Do you want to, do you want to just do a project with us? And the project was like maybe a $30,000 project or something like, yeah, I'll do the project for free in exchange for the chips. So I just quickly did the project for him. And I ended up like these crates of chips showed up.

So that's how I ended up with these chips. I keep looking at them like, oh man, I could probably get my $30,000 back if I would just mount them on a circuit board and sell them. If you, if you mount them on a circuit, on a breakout board and sell them, you can guarantee that they will sell i think immediately because uh the problems with powering and maintaining commodore 64s is getting harder and harder every year the power supplies are all dead now building a new power supply from scratch is a giant pain just that aspect of it alone if it had a breakout so that you could plug in an original c64 keyboard into it, then it would

sell immediately. Yeah. Well, now you're inspiring me. Maybe I should do it. But you asked, you asked what my opinions were on emulating versus doing it in hardware. I did. Yes. Yeah. I kind of feel like one of those old farts back in my day, we actually had to use gates. And, uh, but I think it's really really really freaking cool that you can go get a raspberry pi and you know have more compute than 10 commodore 64s like stacked on end right right it's it's amazing and you can do it for like like i saw one was it like 19 or something you get one it's amazing. Yeah. Like if, you know, if I had to do that project over again, I'd be like, hey, go talk to a talented software person.

Just emulate it all. But it just wasn't possible back then. It'd be like an equivalent of taking like, it'd probably be like trying to jam a Dreamcast onto a joystick now. You'd have to build an ASIC to pull that off, or like really custom hardware. You couldn't just emulate it on a Raspberry Pi level chip. Right. I'm up for the challenge if anyone wants to do a Dreamcast on a… So you have these hypothetical future projects,

but an actual project you're working on right now, which I believe is Rob is aiming towards here. I do want to switch over to talking about the project you're working on now. But before I do, I did want to just let Jerry know that Jason is actually known for his work on the Commodore 64 within the C++ community, too. Because he gave a keynote, was it three years ago, Jason? Something like that, 2015. He got some modern C++ code

to transpile onto a C64 emulator, which is pretty cool. Sweet. I compiled to 32-bit x86 and then translated that to 6502 assembly and ran it onto RealCombo64. Oh, I love it. Give me zero page.

Give me, I had to emulate the X86 registers in the zero page to have any chance at all of getting it to work. I know zero page is the most brilliant thing ever. Like that's a kudos to you. That's amazing that you did that. Um, uh, I remember back in the day when I was using my Commodore more, my 128, there was a C compiler for it. Brutal. And like, you couldn't do anything useful. Yes. I gave up on compiled programming languages for about 10 years after first trying C on my Commodore 64, and then waited until I had a faster computer, basically. Well, okay, let me ask you, did you at least do some blitzed stuff like blitz basic? Remember, you could like, speed up your basic by kind of pseudo compiling it? No, I didn't have any of those tools. And I wasn't aware of them wasn't thinking about them at the time, either.

Yeah, I didn't actually buy them. I just pirated them. I was a bad kid. Yeah, well, to be perfectly fair to most of us, I think, I didn't know anyone who owned, like, any Commodore 64 games. We all just had copies of copies of games. And I could blame my brother because he's the one who actually made the copies and then I just played the games.

So, I'm sorry sorry i'll stop talking about commodore soon but it's okay it's good for our listeners here back in my day we had eight bits and a zero page and we liked it um uh so one of the the early software cracking tools was called a fast hack. Um, I think that sounds right. Yeah. Yeah. And I met the designer of that, um, many years later at some like retro computer show.

And I'm like, Oh, I had your tool. And he's like, did you buy it? No. So he's like, yeah,

that was the problem. Like my hacking or my copying tool was so good, it would copy our own copy protection. So no one actually bought the damn thing. I do remember one of those copying tools refusing to copy itself, so we had to use a different copy tool to copy the other copy tool that we wanted to copy. So that, I just realized, I did actually copy a few of those games. It wasn't just my brother. Yeah, there was Fast Hack'Em, Renegade Copier.

Yeah, there was all these really fun... It was a good brother. Yeah. There was fast hack. I'm a renegade copier. Like, yeah, there was all these really fun. It was a good time. Yeah. I actually bought a little software, but not nearly as much as I should have. So kids buy your software. Don't pirate.

It's bad. Yeah. I think a geo works was the only thing I bought for geos. I mean, Oh, one of thousand people in the world that actually bought geos i loved it i used it for all of my papers when i was in elementary school and middle school oh really i did wow mp801 printer i thought dot matrix oh i had one of those yeah

i think it only could print like half a line per pass, and then it had to reset back to the other end and go really slowly across. That's awesome. It's a really interesting design. It didn't actually have pins. The old pin printers would have pins. That actually had a flapper that flapped behind the paper. Really?

And then a hammer that would come down. So as the flapper would come down, it would bang the paper into this flapper wheel that would go past. Really weird design. It strikes me as very Commodore, make things as low cost as possible kind of mentality. Yeah, yeah. Instead of having like 24 solenoids for a 24-pin printer, It had one solenoid to move this hammer in really fast. Huh. That's why everything looked...

A little skewed, huh? Yeah, like, you know, when you move your rolling shutter camera, everything kind of like trapezoids. Yeah. Like, all the letters on that printer were trapezoid. All right, we can talk about the new project now. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. Yeah.

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minutes to set up, with no commitment necessary. Check them out at backtrace.io.cppcast. So I know you guys could definitely geek out about Commodore 64 all day, but do you want to tell us what the new project you're working on is? Yeah, I mean, maybe to bore your listeners with a little bit more history, which will lead up to the new project. I worked at Valve Software. I had the amazing opportunity to go work there. And for listeners that maybe aren't in the PC gaming space,

Valve Software started off as a video game company in the late 90s, had a lot of success, and then they started this platform called Steam. And that's if you're a PC player, you probably buy all your games off of Steam. I imagine all of our listeners know what Steam is. I think with our demographic, almost certainly. Ironically, when they approached me, I had Steam installed on my computer to play Portal or something, but I hadn't connected Valve because I was such a passive player.

And they approached me to come run their hardware R&D department. And I'm like, what a stupid name for a software company, Valve. And I didn't even bother like I was like really happy on the project I was on like all these valve people were constantly contacting me by LinkedIn um I'm a pinball collector they were showing up at pinball events saying like hey you're the perfect person to come like do this like stalking yeah I'm not joking I was like at a pinball um event in seattle like playing on a pinball machine and this person walks up next to me and playing the pinball machine like hey

you're jerry right i'm like yeah hey how are you and like hey i'm from valve i'm like valve people again yeah i mean i kept i was like so blunt too like as they're reaching out to me i'm like i don't want to work for a software company doing hardware. I've done it before. And, you know, usually guys don't have conviction, whatever. And, uh, uh, Gabe Newell flew down to Portland where I was living at the time, took me out to lunch and he's like, Hey, you know, you should really come check us out. And he convinced me, he's like, come on up, come up to Seattle.

It's not an interview. Like, okay. So I go up there and he fucking lied to me it was like it really was an interview and so i get into this room and there's like 10 people in there it's like this rapid fire interview like hey we want to design a game controller how would you do it and i'm like oh i'd go to tynam and we'd do a joint development for whatever and i actually just rolled with it and it was pretty fun and then gabe like gave some nose signal probably. And everyone got up and left.

And then Gabe like took me to the fourth floor of the, um, the valve building. He's like, this fourth floor is yours. You have an unlimited budget, um, bring in all your cohorts,

you know, and I have a grand mission for you. You know, Microsoft is threatening our business, the Steam distribution platform with the Metro user interface, because Windows was, Microsoft was going to lock it down to where you could only buy things through their store if you use the Metro interface. And Valve was concerned that they no longer could sell software on a PC in the future. It turns out Metro sucked,

and it was not as big of a threat as they'd worried. Gabe's like, your grand mission is I want you to invent hardware that makes games more fun and brings the whole family together in the living room and gets us away from Windows. And you have unlimited budgets, this fourth floor is yours, go. And it's like, how could I pass that up? And you're like, totally convinced, really cool culture there.

And so I went off for a few weeks and thought about it and came back with this thesis of like, okay, this is how our hardware R&D labs is going to operate. It's going to be one third researchers, one third product people like myself that create products,

and one-third the prototypers and lab techs that can build things really fast. And so we just set out really quick. I had to convince a bunch of people to move to Seattle from Silicon Valley and all over the world and work for a crazy software startup, I mean, software company in this hardware incubator thing when we did we put this dream team together and we started doing all this fundamental research like we did amazing stuff we were reading people's emotions and through pupil dilation and galvanic skin response and their posture wow we're through brute force we were doing like uh virtual reality and augmented reality systems um that's where i got to like get a peek into the future.

Like I got to actually see just through dumping millions of dollars into, you know, making these prototypes, like what our future looks like in, you know, augmented reality. Did Steam box, game controllers,

HTC Vive came out of all of that work and a bunch of other stuff that maybe will surface or not surface. Things you can't talk about, in other words. Well, I was, you know, stuff that I was really enthusiastic about back then. It was kind of funny. So we were having all the VR folks, like the Oculus people, were coming through our technology all the time and, and learning from us. Like we had one of the executives from Oculus come through and I was a big proponent of wand controllers. So I had a full AR set up with wands and I'm like, the future is wands. So you can click on things and move around. And this executive's like, nah, people are going to want to sit on the couch and just play on Xbox controllers.

So, I mean, when a little known, a lot of people don't know there was a huge riff. Like a bunch of the people were pilfered from the Valve team and went over to Oculus. And we actually, Valve ate their lunch with the HTC Vive. Like Oculus shipped an Xbox controller. We shipped room scale. Well, I was already gone by that point, but they shipped room scale and wands and all kinds of amazing things.

And their new Knuckles controller, like, I saw that seven years ago. I actually helped work on kind of early prototypes of that kind of controller. So it's exciting. Probably a lot of stuff that we worked on is going to slowly surface from that. Sorry, again, long story, but it really is leading up to what I'm doing now. I promise you. So Valve didn't have commitment behind AR. They ended up just

cutting the whole AR team and a group of us that got pushed out of the company decided to start a company called CastAR. Super early in the AR space, we made an AR headset. We did a Kickstarter like five years ago. The Kickstarter was super successful. We shipped a couple hundred of the units. We moved to Silicon Valley. We raised money from Silicon Valley venture capitalists. And that's when, unfortunately, things went completely off the rails for us. Like, I was not prepared to be in a leadership position in a venture backed company. And being a first time entrepreneur like that, I got taken advantage of big time by the VCs. And they ended up like stripping all of our leadership out of the company and

brought in a bunch of Disney executives that just ran the company like Disney, like these huge marketing research projects for three quarters of a million dollars. They just burned through our money and crashed the company into the ground, which was just really, really sad. But there was this core team, like,

you know, we see what the future is with AR, and we just like couldn't let it die. So we bought all the assets, and then we hunkered down and we restructured like what we were doing. Really thought hard about like, how are we going to run the company? How are we going to make sure that we don't fall into these same landmines that happened before? How do we maintain control of our own company? And so two years ago, we started a company called Tilt 5, which is based on some of the kind of DNA from this CastAR project.

And we reinvented the product. And so the product is these glasses. You just slip them on, you flip open this game board, and magic appears in front of you. Game characters are just like running all over the table, you can reach in and you can touch them. And it's all volumetric and holographic looking, all the things that we've dreamed about for years, you know, watching movies. One of the things that we're highly focused on now, though, is the AR, VR hype is over. The days of being able to get people excited about technology for technology's sake is waning. You can't just do that anymore.

So what we did is we recognized that a couple years ago that we can't just ship a piece of technology we have to ship a complete product to a specific audience and completely own that space ourselves and then expand from there and so we did a bunch of analysis on like where what are market trends where is gaming going we're all gamers we're just like for the video viewers you can see behind me i've got like a hundred board games back here games yeah i have my same room i've got uh asteroid space duel and tempest arcade machines and i've got like seven pinball machines off to my right like i'm a gamer like so it was a natural direction for us and all the team is like gamers but we we did a lot of deep analysis on like like, what market should we go into first, and how are we going to become a viable company?

Because we don't want to do the Silicon Valley, as one of my mentors put it, the Silicon Valley romper room, where you don't have to worry about making profits, and you can just, like on hype. Um, cause that time is over for VR and AR. Um, so we, we looked at video games like, well, maybe we can just take on Xbox and Sony. Like, no, I mean, serious. These are the conversations you have to have when you're trying to figure out where you're going. And we're like, okay, that would be pretty foolish. They put probably a billion dollars each into marketing. And we actually were considering things like this, like, well, maybe our message could be, we're going to free you from your television and you're

going to bring it to your coffee table and you're going to sit around the table with your friends. And it's this freeing thing. It's like a really compelling message. But unfortunately, we just can't compete with the big boys like that. And they're like, okay, what about education? Oh, man, the sales cycle on education is like three years. We'll never survive. Okay, how about board games? Like, ah, well, here's a really big market.

It's like $7 billion. Huge. And very little technology has gone into it so far people love it it's growing huge and it's like it's a natural fit for augmented reality and so we're like we came up with the thesis and this is what we've been working on for the last two years it's like we're going to take the things that you love about board games and we're going to take the things you love about video games we're going to blend those together and we're going to take the things you love about video games, we're going to blend those together, and we're going to make this spectrum that you can live in. Like if you're a pure video game player, you can play.

If you're a pure board game player, you can play. So some of the things, the value that we provide is like, if you're just a hardcore cardboard and plastic miniatures kind of player, you don't need to have a lot of augmentation, but you can still, with our system, you can use your physical pieces and you can, I'll use Warhammer, for example. Warhammer, you know, players paint up all their miniatures and they put them down on a battle map. You're a Warhammer player, Rob, were you?

I was in high school. Yeah, it's been a while. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. I have a funny story about warhammer maybe i'll come back to it okay and it's about our evolution of trying to figure out how to like um make a message to go to our audience um but right i'll try to come back to that because it's kind of funny um but warhammer right no i'm gonna go into the story i'm'm just going to go into the story first. Sorry, I'm so random today. Got a couple cups of coffee into me. So when we were early in this process, I went to a local Warhammer get together and I walked in. I'm like, guys, we got this AR system. Forget about your stupid little minis. We can just digitize. I'm being silly, but forget about your digital or your minis. We can just make those digital and like everything can be virtual. And, you know, their response is like, fuck you. I almost, you'll have to kill me before you take my minis out of my cold, dead hands.

And like, oh, oops. Okay, well, that's the wrong approach. And so I went back and thought about it and we all thought about it. It's like, no, you know, what we can provide to the folks that play warhammer which when they they work with physical objects is they put their um their minis down they roll dice and you know they're progressing through a story but they're using lots of like tape measures to measure what their hit radius is they're trying to like kind of get down and look you know what's the line line of sight? Like, can I actually see around this mountain to, you know, attack this creature or whatever?

Like, oh, well, actually, this is a simpler problem for those type of tabletop players. Like, well, what if I just provide a tool that tracks your miniatures and then gives you a hit radius and can give you a line of sight? And they're like, oh my God, this is the most amazing thing. We would pay $20,000 for that. So that's some of the value we can provide to traditional tabletop gamers.

Now for video game players that like board games, you're accustomed to just logging in and playing with your friends. And so we can actually do that with tabletop games. So we can take one game board in your home and link it with another game board in the other home. And we have these advanced tracking techniques, like we can track hands. So you can track your hand through the scene, and you could be playing with your friends,

and it could be completely virtual, or it could be a blend of actual physical objects that have a an avatar or a telepresence um representation at the far end i move my hand through and be like hey let's go visit this village over here and point and you would see my hand and we in our headset we have full voice chats you could be talking we could be tracking your hands you could be tracking your objects and we can virtualize it. You can also have the virtues of video games. Like in my living room here, I have two big screen TVs. I have two Xboxes, two PlayStations. I have a Switch. I have all these things to have social gaming with my friends, and I have to go to those extremes. And it kind of sucks because you're not really sitting across from each other

just kind of sitting on the couch facing two screens with our system you can actually sit around the coffee table or your dining room table and you can be sitting across from each other playing an action game or an rts and like when i get a good hit on your uh your your your guys and i win i can actually see your face and the dynamics of sitting across from each other is just so compelling and so addicting. Yeah, taunting in person is better. Yeah. I mean, it becomes like a lot of it's above the table,

right? You're kind of watching, it's almost like playing poker, but you're playing video games, you're kind of watching like playing, it's almost like playing poker, but you're playing video games and you're watching your friends like, oh, I can see they're stressed out because I just sent my units over there to attack their base. Right. So that's really cool stuff that we can bring to more on the video game side of it. And then for the storytellers and the more theatric people, we bring a lot of really cool features. And we're working with partners,

third-party game developers make this all happen. For the D&D players, there's a level of theatrics that we can provide that's just amazing. So imagine you're the DM. You could work for weeks on this map. You can put all your monsters in there. You can put all your monsters in there. You can put all your traps and your dungeons and your caves and stuff into this virtual map. And all your friends can come over.

Some of them that can't make it to your game night can just link their game board to yours, and they can come in remotely. But then you can, since each person sitting around the table wearing our headset gets their own private view into the space, you as the dungeon master, you get to see where all the monsters are and what's coming up next. They can't see it until the players, right? Yeah. So now you have this theatrics that you can do.

So you could do something like you wave your hand over the game board and say an eerie mist settles into the valley and actually because we're tracking your hand you can have an eerie mist come out of your hand and settle into the valley your remote players see an avatar of your hand cruising through the game space dropping the eerie mist and you know it's like this tool to like enhance your story you can add sounds to it positional sound even so it's like you know to the right of the cave you know you hear uh rumbling chains and like you trigger it and the chains are actually coming from the right side of the cave you can say like the villagers told you not to enter the cave but you enter anyway and then boom you trigger the monster springs up and then the fog of war is lifted and the monster springs up and like all of your friends get to see it.

And all the people, regardless of where they are on the table, will see and hear things correctly from their perspective. Yeah. And it's up to the game developer. And so we've made a bunch of different tools for the game developer where they can do these different things. So a lot of this comes for free in the game engine, like the positional audio. We take the head position through cameras in the headset, and we send that down to the game engine. That takes over the camera inside the game engine and moves it around the scene to the correct location. Okay.

So, like, if I have a building, I might be – personally, I'm looking at the front of the building. I see the front door. You might be sitting across from me, so you're looking at the front of the building. I see the front door. You might be sitting across from me. So you're seeing the back door of the building. And so the game developer can know where around the scene the person is. And plus the person actually gets the correct view from that scene. If you don't want the game player to see that perspective, you can actually, it's up to the developer, you could have everyone kind of facing, say, north in the scene, wherever they're sitting around the table.

And we actually have a couple games like that. So we have this kind of party game where you're like shooting blocks and you're trying to like, you know, screw over your friends. But you sit on all four sides of the game board, and you're all kind of shooting down from the same perspective, even though you're not facing the same side. So you see there's laser pointers in it. You see all these laser pointers moving around from your friends, but they're all coming from the same perspective. Sorry, that was hard to explain.

There's a lot of flexibility for the game developer to choose what each person sees and what perspective they see and even world scale so say we're doing a real-time strategy you have one player may be extremely zoomed in on their base and they're doing like fine detail of like building up the fortifying their base the other player could be like zoomed way out and looking at the world view and like planning their strategy okay um this is so unique like um for video games like video games we've always struggled even back in the day like split split screen like trying or or having to actually network and have people sit in another room to

have like privacy so you're not seeing each team's strategy right now you can like sit around the table and it's private and and it's up to the game developer to choose what's shared information and not so the kickstarter that you launched is focused on uh dev kits and those are going to be out next July, is that right? It's not actually focused on dev kits. Yeah, so we've been working really hard for the last two years going back to

we want to make this a complete package. So we have a bunch of game developers lined up that are bringing content to tabletop specific games. So we have Fantasy Grounds, for example. So these examples I was talking about, the theatrics for D&D. Fantasy Grounds has thousands of adventure packs for D&D, Pathfinder, Starfinder,

just tons of these RPGs. We have a couple of announcements coming about pure kind of classic tabletop games, which will unlock hundreds of tabletop games for our system. And then we have a bunch of action games like Kill All Zombies or Chuck's Challenge, which are more action-based, pure video games. And then we're providing a bunch of party games, which we developed ourselves, which are kind of akin to Wii Sports, kind of casual, like bring your whole family together.

But, I mean, maybe why you're thinking it's developer-focused is we felt that it's a chicken-and-egg problem. We're going to be shipping a bunch of these units out there, and we have to have a constant flow of content, which is challenging for any platform. And so what we've done, instead of, like, some of the other competition out there, they charge for developer kits. We made sure that our, like, consumer-facing product also comes with all the SDK and is completely open. Oh, okay. So anyone can do it.

Anyone can be a developer. Yeah, yeah. And so right now we have developers working with our early prototypes. December, they all get a refresh to this new hardware, which is we've done some amazing stuff with it. And then for the Kickstarter backers, we have like a really early beta for only the most hardcore. We're trying to message only the most hardcore people that can tolerate bugs.

Don't get it if you can't tolerate bugs. And that's a good place for developers to go. And then in June, July, and August, we're already moving into shipments in August. We're spreading out shipments all the June. I think almost all the July are done. In August, we're spreading out the shipment of the more consumer ones, which are fully bundled with this software. So I know you're the hardware person here,

but is there anything about the API, the SDK? I mean, this is CBPCast. We haven't really mentioned C++ at all yet, but what does the story look like from the programmer's perspective? Can I say C-sharp? You can say it, yeah. It's a C-sharp SDK, in other words. Well, so C++, everyone will be happy.

We have C++ native SDK. And so if you have a native app, so something that doesn't run inside of one of the standard game engines like Unity and Unreal, you can take that. You can either look at our Unity plugin, which has a whole bunch of C Sharp in it. I'm sorry. Well, that's almost necessary

with Unity, right? Yeah, yeah. You can see how to apply that to your own custom app. That would be really useful for folks that have a standalone app that's maybe OpenGL or something, and you need to hook up all of our features. And that's for more of the hardcore developers.

We're super proud of our Unity and Unreal plugins. They're so easy, even I can use them. And that's saying a lot. I mean, if we programmed in Verilog, man, I could just do all kinds of amazing things. No, so the Unity plugin, for example, is mostly drag and drop. So you import our package. There's some scripts in there. You make an empty game object. You drag our script onto it. Boom. That's 90% of there you make an empty game object you drag our script onto it boom that's 90 of what you have to do now it's rendering the scene for you so it's basically

just another i o device is that fair yeah yeah yeah um sorry the most you no no no it's cool um the the most that you have to do to get your first project rendering is drag this script in and start dragging sliders back and forth to scale the world. We have widgets that help you see where the game board's going to be and where the graphics are going to fall out of the game board and where it's going to be. So it's great for, like, before you even deploy it to the headset, you can see what it's going to look like. And then we have our wand. So each kit comes with a six degrees of freedom wand

that lets you move through 3D space. It's got joysticks, it's got buttons, accelerometers, and haptics and stuff in it. And all the buttons and joysticks just look like regular gamepad inputs, so you're going to have no problem with that. Then the sixth aspect of it is again it's drag and drop so you just drag a game object into our plugin into the inspector and now that game object's moving through um 3d space and we have a bunch of helpers in there you can do a

couple check boxes to do different things to lock it to certain access or have a ray cast so it emulates a mouse and and stuff like that um yeah yeah we're super excited i mean we recognized early on a lot of these arvr systems are not easy to use so we put a lot of work into our plugins to make it you know drop dead simple of course a lot of stuff is exposed. If you just want to go super hardcore and bypass all our stuff, it's exposed as well. Some of the features of our headset that might be interesting that are kind of exposed through this SDK is like, we have two cameras in our headset. So we have a head tracking camera, and that also tracks our wand. And so it's a really wide field of view. So it's 140 degree field of view,

which gives you this huge volume in front of you of tracking. So you can have the wand above your head. You can have it down below to the side. You have like this huge space where the wand will work and a huge space where you can move your head around and the game board is being tracked. We have a second camera, which is a high resolution, high speed global shutter camera

with IR illumination on it. Our whole system, I should back up on the camera systems, we can work in complete darkness to complete daylight, which is unique to our system. Yeah, a lot of systems fall apart if the lights are turned off because they don't do their own illumination. We actually have two wavelengths of infrared light that come from our headset that illuminate the scene, and then each camera is filtered for those particular wavelengths. So the head tracking is on one frequency. We have a different frequency than what we're calling the machine vision camera or the computer vision camera.

And with that, you can do hand tracking. You can detect playing cards where they are, you can detect chips and tokens, you can detect miniatures, you can actually train up algorithms to detect complicated 3D objects. Did I say hands? Yeah, hands, you can track hands with it. And that's completely exposed to the developer. So we have a couple examples that use open source tracking to do things like hands and objects that we provide. But if you don't like our algorithms, just feel free to use our super awesome camera. Sorry, I'm geeking out on the camera because I invented a bunch of the optics in this. And we're just doing stuff that others have neglected.

Like having strobed IR is such a big deal for the cameras. Like when you have high motion, like you're moving your hands, we can extract. It's like a photo flash. We can extract your hands with no motion blur out of the scene. Or you're whipping your head around and you still want to track your hand. You can still do that with our camera system. Since you're geeking out about it, what are the resolutions of these cameras that they would have access to? The one that's important is the machine vision camera, which is 8 megapixel.

So at 8 megapixel, running full resolution, no downscaling or anything. It's 60 frames per second. And then, of course, it goes up from there if you do different binning and scaling and stuff of the image. I mean, it's super high res. And it's actually, what's cool is for folks that know hardware out there, there isn't really 8 megapixel global shutter sensors that you can afford in a consumer product. But because we came up with this clever filtering technique and the strobing LEDs, we actually run the image sensor in a really clever way where the entire sensor is exposing all the time, but it's heavily filtered for an extremely narrow wavelength of light.

And so it globally gets exposed when we flash the LED. So the best image sensor you can get that's global shutter is like 1,024 pixels across. And I forget what the resolution is, like three or four times that. Wow. And we get the same performance. Sorry, I'm a hardware geek. I'll geek out. That's fine. I should talk about the other optics in it, too.

Oh, sure. So what makes our system special over, say, a HoloLens or Magic Leap as far as the optics goes, and I don't want to diss on those systems. They're amazing systems. They're just not the same price point and the same performance as ours for tabletop experiences. Those systems are fixed focus. So the light that comes into your eyes are fixed at one focus, you know, somewhere out in the world.

A magic leap gives you two focuses, focus distances. What you really need is to have a great experience within arm's reach. You need to have infinite depth of focus because when you get close to your, bring virtual objects close to your eyes, you either have to trick your eyes into focusing at the wrong depth, or you need to have an optical system that's in focus. And so we've created this optical system that uses the actually a round trip pass to the game board and back to the eyes to keep the pixels in focus. And so it's a huge benefit for us because the images are amazing and bright and clear and in focus, and you can actually take our wand and you can pull the trigger and spawn a virtual object on the end of it.

You can actually focus on the wand and the virtual object simultaneously, which no other system can do. Or you can take a miniature, like your toy dragon, you put it down on the table, and it can be breathing virtual fire. Right. And you can actually focus on it all at the same time, and it matches up. It allows our system to be super cheap. We can have a 110-degree field of view, which just absolutely crushes the other guys as far as field of view,

and it fills the whole table with graphics. And it allows us to hit a $299 price point. Wow. And that's per headset, I assume. Yeah, for a complete kit. You get the wand, headset, and this projection board. Right. I am definitely interested in getting this myself.

I am a D&D player. I haven't played Warhammer in years years but I do still play D&D We're going to get you back into it No, I play now and all my friends, we don't live in the same place anymore so currently we're playing online with a tool called Roll20 I know you mentioned Fandom Fountain, it's similar to that

but I know I miss that being able to sit around a table experience and it sounds like this can bring it back even when it is with someone who's not actually at your table that's our whole objective is like there like people love board games and tabletop games but you know there's this friction you have to get everyone around the table and if you use some virtualized RPG software, it's okay. But you're so removed from the physical aspect of it, it's a little disappointing. We're going to break down those barriers, and you'll be able to play and have this more intimate connection to your games again.

And we're excited. Part of what we're going to provide is our discovery software tool that comes with it as a way to discover new software and to be able to link to other players that are interested in playing games. So you're not only limited to your friends. You could go to a public lobby and say, hey, I want to play an hour game of Catan. It's 10 o'clock at night, go find someone that's willing to play and just do a pickup game of Catan with two or three people. So it's going to open up these opportunities to play more games

just because you can jump in and do it when you want. Or your friends can't make it, just link your game board and play remote. And if you get pissed off at them just flip them off and they can see an avatar of your hand going into the scene right okay well jerry it was really great having you on the show today um where can listeners who are interested find more information maybe sign up to uh to get one of the dev kits yeah i encourage everyone, everyone should back this. They should back it at the $10,000 level.

Just kidding. Yeah, you can go look up Tilt 5, the word tilt and the word 5 on Kickstarter. We have a bunch of different tier levels to match, you know, kind of your gaming desire. So we have a solo pack, which comes with a single headset, single wand, and a game board and all the games that you want in the SDK. We have a little bit nicer set that gives you kind of a battle map size game board, a fancier carrying case, and options for some colors on the glasses if you want to be a little more customized. We have a group pack that lets you get three headsets so your whole D&D crew can pitch in and get one of those. Nice. Then we have our early beta.

Do not buy this unless you want to help us squash bugs. But this gets you the earliest access to the glasses, and it gives you the final glasses when you're done. And then we just have the insane super fan we want to keep money on you $10,000 one. You just get all these prototypes and all the headsets

and a bunch of cool stuff. We don't expect you to do that one. So if there's anyone who's interested and they want to check out the SDK before they decide to back, is it possible for a random person to go and sign up and download the SDK? Oh, that's a great question. We get asked that a lot.

And so we're a little reluctant to send out the SDK right now because there's not a ton of things to do with it until you have the glasses. So one of the things that we're talking about doing is releasing the widgets in a form that has some animations that can drag the camera around into different positions and will animate the wand game object so that you

can kind of get a feel. We've given the SDK out to developers before and unfortunately all it does is just open up lots of support questions for us like right and um when you actually have the glasses and you just can use it it makes a lot more sense so we think that probably the widgets will be kind of more interesting so you can start working on your game and know where the graphics fall yeah that's actually the part that i thought

of when you described the widgets when you were talking about the SDK, really. Yeah. I mean, there's a YouTube video I put together where I walked through the plugins, which if I can walk through the plugins, feel confident they're not complicated. So I'm a chip designer, not a programmer. Anyway, in five minutes, I show how to put your first project together. And it's super-duper simple. But, yeah, I think timelines for all of this, Q1, you'll start to see these widgets and stuff start to come out about the same time the beta kits come out. And then June and July, when, of course, everyone will have access to it. Okay, cool. It's been great having you on the show today, Jerry.

Oh, I'm sorry. I just, I forgot to, I mean, some things that might be important to the listeners. Uh, what system does it work with? Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I inferred windows when you said C sharp. So, well, um, so, uh, we work with Android devices that have a USB-C. We have a really, yeah, actually one of the clever things in our system is, I talked about this at Valve Software when we were originally looking into AR and VR. I was like, this is the way all headsets are going to work in the future. And finally we could make a chip do this for us in this new headset. And what we do is this thing called reprojection,

where you receive an image asynchronously from the game engine, and then you upscale its frame rate to 180 frames per second, which does all of the tracking and image stabilization and sticks it to the game board. That allows the game engine to run at whatever frame rate it can manage. You know, sometimes game engines bog down. In virtual reality systems, that's a disaster. It gives the user a really bad experience. And so that means that you have to have a big, beefy computer. With our system, you can plug into Android phones, and it can run at kind of modest frame rates, and then we upscale it to the correct frame rate to have a great user experience. Then it also means that you can plug into a PC through USB-C and you can use a pretty modest PC. Or if you have like a pretty decent PC, you can plug multiple headsets into

the same PC and launch multiple instances of the same game and have all your friends running off one PC. So that's convenient for folks that maybe don't want to have a bunch of pcs around the table you can just bring one out and then run all the the games on it what's the practical cable length uh on a usbc limit right now we're going to ship it with something about six feet um there's cable extenders you can use hubs okay things like that but beware yeah danger will robinson not all hubs perform as uh advertised so yeah i imagine once we get out there like these cable extenders um you can buy cable extenders we'll probably have a list of like you know get this cable extender don't use this one and okay yeah right but it's it's straight up usb super speed so we're not doing any of the weird

stuff like transporting video over display port so um if you have a pc uh and you don't have usbc ports you just use the usb super speed the blue 3.1 yeah well right, yeah. I mean, so for techies, my favorite thing to do that they know the challenges of doing AR is that I'll put them in the headset. I'll have them look at the game board. Then I'll turn the game engine off, and I'll let them sit there for five or six seconds. And I'll be like, by the way, the game engine's not running. That image that you see there that's perfectly stable is the same image that's been there for five seconds. And people's minds are like, what? You actually like you're doing reprojection. And so the device itself is able to keep the stable image there.

Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty cool for any rotation. It works perfectly for small translations. It's fine. The only time it breaks down is if you stop rendering and you step one foot to the side or something, the images instead of looking correctly vertical, sticking out of the game board, they look like they start to lean a little bit, which is kind of a funny effect. It's kind of the bane of my existence. I'll have the

glasses on and I'll be developing, I'll be doing something on the PC and I'll look over at the game board and Unity crashes or something. I'll be sitting there looking at the static scene. I'm like, okay, update, update, update. And I'll be wasting all this time because the headset's just accurately reprojecting the image. Wow.

All right. So we should. Anyway, I can let you go. Yeah. Thank you so much. It was super fun. It's been a great episode. Super fun.

Thank you. Yeah. Thanks so much for listening in as we chat about C++. We'd love to hear what you think of the podcast. Please let us know if we're discussing the stuff you're interested in, or if you have a suggestion for a topic, we'd love to hear about that too. You can email all your thoughts to feedback at cppcast.com. We'd also appreciate if you can like CppCast on Facebook

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