Hey guys, don’t get excited yet, there is nothing to download. But I am working on creating a version of the board game Labyrinth. I have part of the backend coded already and am working on the UI now.
If anyone is inspired to make some tiles for the game it would be appreciated as I am sure they would look better than the black and white standins I am using now.
I’ll update the post if I make any progress or have anything to test, stay tuned.

I can help with tiles. Let me know when your ready.

anyway i’ve got an idea on multi-touch board gaming.. as i’m a avid board gamer myself…

i was thinking of the surface could recognize the outcome of a dice throw… as we know that for a dice.. opposite sides add up to 7… so for example if the surface recognizes a 2 on the dice(the side touching the surface)… that would be a 5.. wonder if that’s possible? another idea is for the surface to recognize cards the cheapest way… embedding RFID into every card would be too expensive imo…

i think multi-touch board gaming would be nice as we can see the animations when “characters fight” or when “unleashing spells” and also automated score keeping, etc.

keep the ideas going… cheers

icube - 21 June 2008 10:53 AM

anyway i’ve got an idea on multi-touch board gaming.. as i’m a avid board gamer myself…

i was thinking of the surface could recognize the outcome of a dice throw… as we know that for a dice.. opposite sides add up to 7… so for example if the surface recognizes a 2 on the dice(the side touching the surface)… that would be a 5.. wonder if that’s possible? another idea is for the surface to recognize cards the cheapest way… embedding RFID into every card would be too expensive imo…

Yeah, I was thinking of both of these things as well. The problem I foresee with dice is the camera not being high enough resolution to see the pips. Anyone tested this? Maybe with large high contrast dice it would be possible. As for cards, the best way I thought of was to print fiducials on the back and/or front of the cards. The reactivision fiducials look complicated enough that humans probably wouldn’t recognize cards based on the fiducials. If this is a problem perhaps printing them somehow where the ir contrast is way higher than the visible light contrast. (so the camera can see the image clearly, but people can not.)

I haven’t made much progress on the Labyrinth game recently, been working on other projects/busy at work. At this point I have (single touch) slidable tiles and that’s about it. Hopefully I will be able to work on it some more in the next few weeks.

regarding the dice… i made a proof of concept on a 24” surface using fiducials… and yeah the cam resolution is a bitch there.. but i could manage well with a 1” dice and using a higer resolution (960X720 or something) by cutting down on fps to 7-8 fps.. since you dont need high fps for a dice.. which means that you cant really use hand gestures in an app which is using a dice.

since this was only a proof of concept .. my dice had fiducials pasted on em.. with number printed in a corner. but m sure.. if someone works on it.. it could be resolved… i used vvvv for my project back in march 2007. tangible interface and stuff…

@gazpachoking .. regardin using fiducials on cards… if you go thru how fiducials work… (i guess reactvision has a document on that) .. its really easy to decode em.. since they basically work on a hierarchal code of 0’s n 1’s based on the black and white zones as you go from outside the pattern to the inside.. so it would almost become like counting cards in black jack…

an ideal situation would be if there is something similar to UV ink for infra red… ink that is invisible to naked eye but visible to IR .. you can print “invisible” fiducials using that..

m not sure if that exists or not…

Using real dice would be cool, but throwing virtual dice by dragging a few fingers to generate a random number would work for me When using a computer, some things might be automated. For instance in some cases the outcome of a roll can be hidden and you only expierence the result.

A black dice with white dots & a DI setup might work, i would expect that t he white dots would reflect the IR good, but you would still need some image processing to read the dice then..

Easy way to fix the resolution and speed issue. Hook up two cameras and run one with reactivision and the other with touchlib… Bam your good.