Tilt Five’s AR glasses will support one of the world’s most popular board games, Catan, in Spring 2023.
The announcement today from the Santa Clara-based startup focused around AR tabletop gaming means that a Steam release of Catan is planned to support Tilt Five’s platform in Spring 2023.
For those unfamiliar, Tilt Five makes AR glasses which deliver a market-leading field of view when viewing content reflected from its game board. It is a system with major constraints — you still need an external computing device to power the glasses and can only see the AR content when it’s backed by a retroreflective material — but Tilt Five also leans into this by specifically focusing on tabletop gamers who want to gather together physically around a gameboard and see each other’s faces while playing an AR game with impressive visuals.
Catan, formerly known as The Settlers of Catan, sees players build out settlements while trading resources with others. VR versions of the game have launched previously for Quest and even as far back as Gear VR, while Niantic even launched (and subsequently shut down) an AR version of the game.
This summer Tilt Five has been delivering its hardware product to backers of its 2019 Kickstarter campaign, more than two years later than originally planned, and the company noted earlier this month that “recent supply chain issues are causing delays for some of the upcoming shipments.” The company is currently taking pre-orders for the system starting around $359, including the glasses, wand and gameboard. Tilt Five is currently working on support for its glasses from iOS and Android phones as well as powering multiple pairs of glasses from a single PC.
We confirmed with Tilt Five that Catan is only supported from a Steam release of the game on PC, with no word yet on whether it might be able to be played with multiple glasses from a single PC.
