Self-taught female computer hacker starts augmented reality company

Jeri Ellsworth began playing pinball when she worked in a bowling alley as a teenager, and a manager there would occasionally give her a few free credits. Today, she has a collection of more than 70 pinball machines, but her passion has moved from the mechanical into a new digital augmented reality, which she believes will be the future of entertainment.

Ellsworth, 45, is a self-taught computer hacker and chip designer who recently started an augmented reality gaming company, Tilt Five, in San Jose. She is emblematic of a generation of Silicon Valley hobbyists who were passionate about computers and only later turned their passions into commercial enterprises. She originally gained visibility as an independent chip designer living in a rural ramshackle farmhouse in Yamhill, Ore.

Ellsworth was able to squeeze the entire circuitry of a decades-old Commodore 64 home computer onto a single advanced silicon chip, which she then tucked neatly into a joystick that was connected by a cable to a TV set. Called the Commodore C64 Direct-to-TV, her device was able to run 30 video games, mostly sports, racing and puzzle games from the early 1980s, all without the hassle of changing game cartridges.

She was later hired by gaming company Valve Software to lead its research effort in augmented reality, which uses special glasses or holographic displays to superimpose three-dimensional objects and text on the physical world.

In 2013, she created Palo Alto startup castAR, an augmented reality company that planned to design a system to support desktop 3-D gaming. Ultimately, the company raised more than $1 million in a Kickstarter campaign, then gave the money back when it was unable to raise a second round of financing. With other castAR employees, Ellsworth acquired the original technology from investors and has used it to start...