Atmo – Interactive bubble for board games
Atmo at the Demo Day
During the last 6 months I was in the Atmo team to develop a working prototype for an interactive board game extension as part of the Talent program at Kitchen Budapest.
The goal was to create a demo for the Bang Dice game. The gameplay is somewhat simplified. In our version there are at most 4 players, who take turns to toss the dice.
The experience consists of 3 different parts.
- Projected images and animations on top of the table
- Sound effects for the different events in the game
- There is an atmospheric light that illuminates the ceiling and the surroundings to create the appropriate mood
Hardware
The harware has many components:
- A camera with infra filter: for dice recognition
- A small projector for animations
- Infra LEDs to illuminate the board for the camera
- RGB LED strip: for the atmosphere lighting
- Speaker: for sound effects
- A Raspberry Pi 3: to control and connect the other components
First prototype of Atmo – The board game accessory
Development
A critical part of this project is computer vision. We have to recognise the dice (up to 5 pieces) after they are tossed as fast as possible. This is quite a challenge since the dice are very small and we have a down-facing camera ~1m above the table on a white background. This makes it sometimes almost impossible to detect the edges of a die so we have to scan through the whole image.
However, we have already overcome several challenges:
- Removing the projected picture from the camera image
- Transforming the input coordinate system to match the projection coordinate system
- 4 independent parts in atmospheric lighting for each player
- Die detection for black dice with white symbols on white background:
If you want to get up-to-date news about the projects, follow us at: https://www.facebook.com/projectatmo