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.

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.

Just to pile on: I'd love to know what happened, too.

The gear seemed very "not vapor". There are a lot of hands-on demo stories out there going back several years. I heard that dev kits were shipped for the v1 product.

I was really, really looking forward to this gear. I don't think anything else on the market fills the multi-player tabletop gaming niche. The entire concept (and particularly the LED-based tracking) seemed novel. I really hope somebody buys the IP and produces a product.

I think the problem wasn't that Castar wasn't cool or neat, it was just...dim. Literally dim. They relied on pico projectors which just don't have the lumens to really throw out the brightness you need.

It had some fun demos and the eyewear wasn't awful, but it was, in my opinion, just not enough. Not enough brightness, not enough library/game support and it required you throw the retroreflective material around wherever you wanted your game surfaces to be.

If you could have a completely enclosed room, in the dark, with surfaces like you mention, that would be an ideal usecase. but ..sadly..this is not common and isn't the kind of customer base that makes a company successful.

I wanted castar to succeed too, but without a huge war chest to incentivize content/studio support and distribution to lots and lots of users, they were doomed.