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castAR bets big on its augmented reality hardware with move to Silicon Valley
Jeri Ellsworth is moving. Though she was born in Georgia, the former Valve engineer and all-around hardware guru was raised in Oregon and has always called the Pacific Northwest her home. Even during the seven or so years when she would travel regularly to Silicon Valley as a computer chip consultant, her base of operations never deviated. Now, however, it will. Technical Illusions, the company that she founded with fellow former Valve co-worker Rick Johnson to create a projected augmented reality system called castAR, is uprooting from Seattle and moving to Mountain View, California. And she -- along with the rest of the company's 10 or so employees -- is following suit.
Jeri Ellsworth talks castAR's accidental beginnings and its augmented reality future (video)
By now, followers of castAR already know that Jeri Ellsworth created the projected augmented reality glasses back when she worked for Valve Software. But not everybody knows that its invention was, well, an accident. "I was trying to figure out why people got sick when they wore virtual reality rigs," said Ellsworth to us as we chatted in the tiny castAR booth tucked away in the corner of Moscone North during GDC 2014. "I put a reflector in backwards so that it wasn't projecting into my eye ... There was a piece of reflective fabric in the room, it bounced an image back to me, and it was beautiful."
castAR's vision of immersive gaming gets closer to final production
Five months ago, Technical Illusions gained over a million dollars in funding thanks to a highly successful Kickstarter campaign for castAR, a projected augmented reality project that company founders Jeri Ellsworth and Rick Johnson brought over from Valve when they were laid off almost two years ago. Ever since the campaign's success, the company has been ramping up prototyping on a rapid scale so that the final unit can be sent off for mass production. Along the way, the company has grown from two employees to 11, and Ellsworth has since moved from Portland to Seattle to be with the team (dragging her collection of 80-plus pinball machines along with her). Ellsworth has also just hired the services of a Japanese company (she won't name which) to provide her with improved optics and thinner circuitry, which she admits is better than the homemade solutions she and her partners have cobbled together so far. This all means, sadly, that castAR is still very much in progress, which is why even though Technical Illusions is here at GDC 2014, we were unable to look at the final castAR hardware. We were, however, able to take a look at castAR's latest prototype that has never before been seen outside of Technical Illusion's office until this week.
