I posted this originally at ArsTechnica but I'll copy it here as well.

http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/39309975/m/642002793931



For many years Saturday (and sometimes Friday) nights have been game night for a small group of friends and I. Our gaming tastes have wandered around to encompass such classics as 'Settlers of Catan' (+ Seafarers of Catan), Munchkin, Phase10, Fluxx, Scrabble, Cranium, etc.. We've now begun a new journey into uncharted territory (no, not D&D).
Wormhole: The Sathricans

The gist:
Space combat board game played with ships and tokens you print out from a series of PDF files. The ships are 3D. You print them on heavy paper, cut, fold, glue, and use foam core for the base plate. The models can become quite intricate. I'm not making the game pieces but another from our group is. It's quite the process.

Anyway, so we've started learning how to play Wormhole and the first two outings were played just on a kitchen table. We used whatever was handy to represent asteroids and other objects on the board. Last night we stepped things up a notch.

We collectively thought up using a projector pointed downward to display the 'board' as a star field. I set about modifying the mount for my ceiling projector to allow it to point straight down. I rigged it with zip ties, gaff tape, and a bit of velcro and everything worked exceptionally well. Next we moved the kitchen table into the living room and positioned it to line up with the projected image.


Here you can see the rough setup of the table and projection. The projector mounts in the ceiling weren't parallel with the room so the table had to be turned to match the rotation angle of the image.


Here you can see my most awesome modified projector mount. Normally my projector hangs from three turnbuckles and points toward the wall hung screen. I made two loops of zip ties to cradle the projector vertically and kept the loops from shifting by using gaff tape. The loops of zip ties suspended the projector nicely from two of the turnbuckles. The hanging VGA cable will be remedied. I didn't have a long enough VGA cable to stretch from the installed wall connection out to the middle of the room. All the normal ceiling input cables were disconnected from the projector.


Here you can see the whole finished setup. I used a laptop mounting arm to suspend the laptop above the table. (didn't want it in the way nor getting beer spilled on it). The Ergotron arm wouldn't clamp to my table with it's curved edge so I used a chair positioned next to the table. This worked very well.


On to the good stuff! So this shows the star field projection. (random large rendered image from Google images) The cool looking grid and circles is generated from a totally awesome screen measurement app called PixelStick. We altered the colors so they showed up well on the star field. The game requires a good deal of measuring in order to accurately move your ships and determine firing angles and distances. We determined the PPI of the projected image and created our scale for measuring with the application. The combined effect of the star field projection and the measurement lines made the game awesome to look at in the dark.


Here's a nice close up showing a few ship models on the board and PixelStick measuring out a firing range from the ship at the bottom. We changed backgrounds between games and this one is of the Sunflower Galaxy M63.


So there you go. An evening of greatly enhanced game play, a bit of tech, and some (un)healthy nerdism. :bigdumbgrin:

Next week... a Wiimote and light-pen to control the measurement application!

wow..that's really inventive..

Wowsers, that's amazing.

Thats a great alternative to a normal board.

This is an excellent idea. Simply amazing. I may consider using that in the future.

Over the top and way cool! Thanks for sharing and thank you doubly so for pimping Wormhole elsewhere!

Really? Seriously?
This would be cool on a WHOLE new level.. .and be sure to release the software, since I have a Wii

Brilliant. I like beer.

WOW thats really cool.

Hmm. I've got a little LED/lasery flashlight thingy that projects a pretty large Superman emblem. It's just penlight sized but it easily projects an 4' high emblem on the wall with good clarity. I'm going to have to break it down and see if I can change the slide somehow...

And there I was thinking a disco ball would be all high tech....

Thanks everyone for all the comments. I just posted an update in the ArsTechnica forum which I'll duplicate here:




UPDATE

Since Sunday I've procured myself a Wiimote and crafted an IR pen. The results are very promising.

Here you can see the Wiimote being held with Superclap, Umbrella swivel, and lightstand. I need to adjust it some to get the field of view better. I'm using the app Wiimote Whiteboard to interface the Wiimote to OS X.

Here's a video of the table, pixelstick, and pen in action. Table Demonstration

I've gone yet another step further and decide to create a background animation that includes asteroids. I looked through NASA images and found the asteroids Ida and Gaspra to be my initial trial animations. I gave each asteroid a subtle spin, and small circular orbit. Here's a video showing the 5min seamless loop. Asteroid Background Loop
I'm using two free apps to play the Quicktime movie as a background in OS X. The first is a screensaver called SaveHollywood, and the second is a widget to invoke a screensaver as a background. It's called Desksaver Plus.

Here also is a close-up video of Gaspra rotating near a frigate. Navigational Hazard

You are not married are you? Just kidding. That is absolutely amazing. Is this Idea going to be strictly for Wormhole, or do you have plans of utilizing this for other games?

The projector makes a phenomenal board. I love the moving asteroids.

What you're doing with the pen and wii remote remind me of the tricks here:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/projects/wii/

This is so cool it's almost wrong.


I hope Denny and Bob understand the homage that is being payed to them.


Now I am wondering how that would work for a Fantasy Battle tabletop with bird flying across and adding battle damage. Then a modern Giant Monster tabletop with moving car lines......

Fricking cool.





Lord Abaddon of Wormwood

Really impressive stuff. Microsoft's experimental touch table project always peaked my interest in the same way. Creating what is essentially live group interactivity in a board game with the flash and interface perks of a video game is very appealing to me.

Now if only there was a way to light the ships individually. White LED's suspended above each ship with power source at the base?

Someone should really send this to Boing Boing, Gizmodo, Wired or one of those geek tech feeds

Denny,

As I commented in the ArsTechnica thread, the Reactable project is nearly exactly what needs to be implemented. I've yet to get around and build one, but this project might be the ticket. The bases of the ships would have the fiducial markers so the software interface knows what's what. Then the software could highly the active ship, display damage explosions, and perhaps even draw weapons fire if the angle can be fed correctly to the software.

Lots of possibilities exist.

this is compleately awsome
and i thought i was being cool with the black light and florecent paint touches i was going to be posting in a few weeks.

as far as illuminateing the ships should not be too hard ill take a dig

watch battery leds pinhole drill and some planning ... could be done...

also printing a ship on transparency and useing cut outs from it to make large windows and bays on the models would work nicely.

Please, please, please make this happen!

Now that would be stunning! An almost perfect solution to the problem. Can't wait to see what you come up with

Speechless, I am.

Update: 08-24-2008

My friend and I played last night with all the modifications and enhancements in place. Game play is definitely stepped up several notches from a vanilla game on just a table. I took the suggestions to try the Wiimote from a position directly above the table and tried it out. To my surprise it worked quite a bit better than off to the side of the table. I kept envisioning the pen vertically obscuring the IR spot on the table, but in practice the pen is almost always tilted such that the IR spot is clearly visible by the Wiimote.


Here you can see the new mount for the Wiimote. I used one additional Superclamp and attached the apparatus to the normally used third mounting hook for the projector. The Wiimote is aimed down toward the table and slightly back. The field of view of the IR camera dictated exactly how the Wiimote needed to be positioned in order to see the whole game board.

One of the games we played was the Supply Run scenario. We spiced things up by using an animated background that included rotating asteroids with subtle orbits. I also included two additional asteroids with huge circular orbits that took them well off the game board. These asteroids would cross the game board roughly ever eight minutes. Long enough for us to forget exactly where they crossed and short enough to surprise us during the various stages of each turn. If an asteroid crossed a ship we rolled the collision damage then and there regardless of what stage we were at during the turn.

Video: Supply Run Scenario with Asteroids!


We also created a scenario later in the evening. I made a static background the contained a high resolution image of Mars. The scenario was a rescue mission in orbit above Mars. Each player started in neighboring corners at their own wormhole. Five shuttles were parked in Mars orbit waiting for pickup. The goal was to rescue as many shuttles as possible and drop them off at your own wormhole. Along the way if your opponent lost a few ships well... too bad, so sad.


Here you can see Mars in the background. The wood table obscures all the nice high resolution surface detail of the planet. The five waiting shuttles are there as are two of my Corvettes swooping in to pick up two of them. My opponent can be see in the background maneuvering his ships.


Shuttles safely aboard and making a run for my own wormhole. This game did not play out at all like either of us expected. I think with a little refinement this scenario may be played quite a bit by us. I was hoping to find a high resolution animation of both Mars and Jupiter to use in the background.

lol, I love the asteroids. I always find the moving hazards amusing.

I dearly wish I had access to a simpler setup. It would be great for any mini game with a gridless board.

BrandonKahler,

What resolution are these videos and can you possibly upload them to ftp so that I can nab them? I would like to feature this on the official Wormhole site with a bit of an explanation and link to this thread.

You've done a truly brilliant thing here and I think more people should see this. You just never know where this might take us. I would like to get it out to various gaming blogs, news feeders to show off your work...and of course Wormhole

Denny,

Sure thing. The videos are all full screen resolution to match my projector (1024x768). I did this to keep the scale accurate. I encoded the videos in h.264 and their file sizes range from ~24MB - 77MB.

They can be found here: Background Videos

I don't believe there is any issue sharing the videos. All the source material has come from NASA/JPL. Videos 1-4 are five minute loops while the video titled long is an eight minute loop. Right now the long orbits only cross the vertical axis of the screen. I need to make a background where one or more cross diagonally. I may also make some small asteroids that have elliptical orbits.

Oh sorry I meant the actual play videos not the background videos. That said however I could probably host the background videos as well for those ambitious enough to give this a try themselves.

Genius!

Brandon - Your set up for Wormhole left me speechless! My hat's off to you. You've really done some incredible work here bridging the gap between conventional boardgames and computer games.

I know what you've done is quickly spreading around gamer websites (I got to it from a link at Lead Adventure ( http://www.lead-adventure.de )) but you should post it to Make Magazine ( http://www.makezine.com/ ). Your work could easily be their next cover article.

- Ted

Yep. very very cool.

If you could get ahold of some black paper or fabric to put over the table all of that nifty hi res detail would no longer be obscured.

I may have to do this when I have time. I never would have thought of using a digital projector in this manner.

Denny,

Did you get the PM I sent you?