
CastAR bankruptcy claims documents - tiredwired
http://www.proofofclaims.com/castar/documents/
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exDM69
What a disappointment. CastAR was probably my favorite contestant for a VR/AR
gadget.

And the reason is quite simple: I do flight and racing simulators. Anything
involving a headset that occludes vision of your surroundings makes it
impossible to see your controllers. It's fine as long as you're hands on
wheel/yoke/stick and feet on pedals only driving or flying around with a
relatively simple car or aircraft, but once you need to reach for the brake
balance, landing gear, flaps, engine mode, air traffic control, pit strategy,
etc, you need to find the right button. And there are plenty of buttons if you
do serious sims.

CastAR would have been perfect for building sim pits because you could have a
very large display area with the "relatively inexpensive" retroreflector
fabric. I was dreaming about a simpit flight deck with aircraft window shaped
reflective surfaces.

Oh well, I've managed so far with plain old monitors. Maybe will be a better
gadget in the future, but none of the current VR gadgets do what I want.

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danellis
What actually happened here? They had working prototypes. The tech seemed
sound, and not at all vaporware. Then it suddenly went quiet.

I always thought CastAR would be great for flight simulators with physical
controls and instruments.

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rwg
I was merely a Kickstarter backer of CastAR and have no insider knowledge, but
my guess is that a failed moonshot attempt happened here.

After raising $1 million on Kickstarter, Technical Illusions/CastAR received
an investment from Andy Rubin's Playground Global. CastAR later announced that
they would refund Kickstarter backers' money and give everyone who backed at a
level that would give them a pair of CastAR glasses a voucher for the retail
CastAR glasses, whenever they released. Somewhere along the way, CastAR also
changed course from "AR glasses tethered to a computer/phone" to "standalone
AR glasses." Then they acquired Eat Sleep Play, a game studio in Salt Lake
City. Then they went bankrupt.

Instead of releasing a product (even a rough, beta-quality product!) for their
Kickstarter backers and iterating from there to a retail-quality product, it
seems they took their VC money and went straight for a moonshot standalone
product with first-party games available out of the gate. The moonshot was
expensive, Playground Global declined to invest further, and here we are.

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JoshTriplett
That sounds pretty plausible. I was deeply disappointed when they announced
the pivot to standalone glasses. I didn't _want_ standalone glasses, I wanted
the original device as pitched on Kickstarter. I figured, even if none of the
VR/AR mechanisms worked at all, I'd have been thrilled to have a tiny set of
display glasses with HDMI inputs.

As a backer, I'm pleased that they refunded everyone (and I can confirm having
received a full refund). But I'm still sad to see this result; I had a lot of
hopes for this, and it looked much more promising to me than any of the
alternatives, right up until today.

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audeyisaacs
Glad they gave us backers our money back, but very sad and disappointing they
didn't get the product out :*(

edit: Best of luck to all those involved. I'm hoping we haven't seen the last
of Jeri and Rick.

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CapTVK
I was a backer on "buy Jeri some coffee"-level. Too bad it didn't pan out but
they tried.

At least we have a chance that Jeri might do a few new videos now.

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jcims
>At least we have a chance that Jeri might do a few new videos now.

Silver lining indeed.

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rawnlq
Who are the major players still working on AR glasses? Meta and Hololens?
Magic Leap?

~~~
ryandamm
Don't forget Daqri: [https://daqri.com/](https://daqri.com/)

Enterprise is the one vertical that's still pretty strong in VR/AR, perhaps
because sky-high unit costs and dev investment can be amortized more easily.

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toisanji
thats sad. They had a really cool looking demo. Its too bad they couldn't at
least deliver a v1 product to market.

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zootam
really unfortunate. its a pretty neat idea.

