One of my primary goals with the Warhammer table is ease of use – I want it to be easy to setup and use; otherwise, no one would do either. That being the case, this article will focus on making setup and calibration as easy as possible by sticking to the following goals:
No measurements needed: During setup, there should be no need to measure the height of the projector or any other distances explicitly.
Protractor not required: If the projector and/or webcam is angled relative to the gaming table, the software should be able to determine this and correct for it so that measurements remain correct.
Keyboardless: Once the program is run, the user should be able to run calibration from the table, not the keyboard.
With those restrictions, it is worth noting the primary problems that need to be solved:
Calibrate the webcam, in particular, determine the angle between the webcam and the gaming table.
Calibrate the projector.
Determine the available play area, i.e. the intersection of the area covered by the projector and the webcam.
Spending a lot of time in the car on the way home from Thanksgiving gave me a lot of time to think about an idea for a Warhammer gaming table. The idea is a bit of an amalgam of three technologies that I have seen somewhat recently:
Projectors hanging from the ceiling: I call this a technology, but I guess it’s more of an idea. My first interest in this idea spawned when I saw someone using it as a method for projecting dungeon maps onto a gaming table where the characters would then move around their miniatures to simulate their characters moving through the dungeon. The beauty of this idea, in my mind, was it’s simplicity – there was no program running in the background, it was simply a method of projecting a map somewhere useful.
Team Ninja’s fusing of webcam technology with a projector: Jessa’s senior project group is working on a piece of software that allows a feedback loop to the process – the projector projects a virtual environment and uses the webcam to allow a physical interaction. They are currently working on how to allow the virtual environment to communicate with “smart” physical objects so that they can interact both ways.
The L3D’s Pita Board (at least, I think that’s what it’s called): This bit of tech uses an electronic chess board built into the table to allow the table to detect the locations of certain keyed physical objects. The interesting thing here, for me, is not so much the board itself, so much as the method of user interface. Moving the figures on the board allows the user to change what the program is doing and how it works, without ever having to touch a keyboard or mouse.
Now that you know where I’m coming from, let me flesh out the idea a little more…
