Working setup

Wow it has been more then three days that I have posted something. This doesn't mean that I haven't been doing anything related to the multi-touch assignment. On wednesday I had to go to school to borrow a beamer and to talk to a teacher called Willem-Jan who kindly helped me putting some perspective into my research. He told me that writing is a dynamic proces, that I could change everything at anytime.

Also I tried, with help, to figure out what it is I am exactly fascinated by, what I want to do research on and why I should bother. Why would you want to play boardgame type of games on a multi-touch device while the traditional board games already show that they are working and fun? Anyway I got the assignment to make a table with on one side the traditional boardgames and it's uniqueness comparing to a multi-touch version, mostly focussing on the restrictments. On the other side I would have the multi-touch version with it's added value.

The most important thing I have to do research on is a thing I call the 'Casino Effect' in boardgames. Let me give an example to explain, imagin you just won 200 points on the slots, instead of immediatly adding those points to the total score, you let it add the points over a certain amount of time with maybe even some sound that goes louder the closer it get's to the new amount of points. The whole illusion is that those 200 points in this way, feel a lot more.

Some notes on benefits of a multi-touch table:
* Downloadable content
* The size of the board can be as large as you like
* You can play against the computer (together or alone)
* The ability to create your own map
* The ability to share your map with others
* Add-ons or modifications by others to the game can be shared as well
* Easy customization for theme

After this I used the beamer to finish the second prototype and had it soon fully operational. It worked!! And it worked well!! So after playing around with it, looking into how I can calibrate and tweak I talked to Erwin what would happend if you played catan realtime. Something I am going to develop and experiment with.

Also one major issue is, that I have to think clearly how I am going to test.

So on thursday I tweaked my screen a little bit and had to build the whole setup in my house, which was kinda hard because I want everything to be perfect and I didn't have the material. So I eventually fixed it with my coffee table on the side, which is balancing for 50% on my computer and the other 50% it's being pressed against the wall by a desk. Below the coffeetable I have a beamer pointing upwards and next to it the camera. I don't use a mirror because of three ghost images. I used towels to close the whole thing up. To make the blobs better and to fetch the tracing well I used oil on the screen.