[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.

[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.