Breadcrumbs is a project exploring the Tilt Five AR system.

The day after my last day of my two-year assignment with the Meta Reality Labs Research Design team, not only did I attend AWE for the first time, but I also discovered a handful of fun consumer hardware for the first time. One of them was the Tilt Five augmented reality tabletop system. After a demo, I was curious about what it would be like to develop for it.

The concept of Breadcrumbs is based on leading a character through a map without directly controlling the character and instead luring them with--wait for it--breadcrumbs! Initially, I wanted to see what other tech I could combine with the Tilt Five, but decided to save that for another project.

Installation and setup for the Tilt Five was straightforward and could possibly be done without a tutorial. Setting up the Mixcast software to stream the game view of the Tilt Five wasn't as straightforward, but their documentation was easy to follow. Troubleshooting problems specific to the Tilt Five wasn't exactly Google-able I assume because it is a relatively niche system and support is harder to come by. Hint: Tilt Five's Discord server is probably the best place to find answers.

My biggest headache (literally) during the development process was an aggressive camera drifting/skipping/snapping experience when entering Play mode while in the Unity editor. It happened more with one pair of glasses than the other and it didn't seem other developers were having the same problem I had. Perhaps it was just a hardware issue? It seemed to have fixed itself after walking away from the project for a length of time.

Hardware aside, I spent very little time on game mechanics. I used a simple finite state machine to manage the pigeon character's transition to and from states and utilized Unity's navigation system to set the pigeon's destination to the breadcrumb every time it was tossed. For the breadcrumb, it was parented to the Tilt Five wand. Pressing the 1 button launched it and pressing the 2 button retrieved it.

Other than going back in to clean up some of the code, I don't have any immediate plans to continue Breadcrumbs, but I feel like I got what I wanted out of this project which was getting to know the Tilt Five development process.

Project Details

Unity version: 2021.3.27f1
Platform: Tilt Five (PC)
Camera software: Mixcast
Pigeon asset: Quirky Series - Pet Animals Vol 1 by Omabuarts Studio
Environment assets: POLYGON Town Pack by Synty Studios
GitHub repository: https://github.com/laurenlizardo/Breadcrumbs/