A student project designed to allow physical gaming across vast distances.
During a project design course at UCSD, my team decided to tackle the issue of playing tabletop card games online. Since this took place during the height of the pandemic, it felt fitting that we try to solve the problem of not being able to play certain games in person, where they were designed to be enjoyed. Our solution was a fusion of RFID-enabled playing cards, with a playmat designed to read the card and its position. We combined this data with a web application and webcam that allowed players to complete over the internet, while still seeing each other and using physical game pieces. A combination of hardware sensing and machine vision targeting gave us great control of game data, streamlining the process.
Demo showing the RFID hardware sensing the card code and location of played cards on the array.
Final demo of the complete system. While we didn’t have the time to integrate both the RFID array and the vision targeting, we were able to demonstrate that both function with the web application. I was responsible for the RFID array and RFID-enabled game elements.
A close-up of the microcontroller and USB-C computer interface.
RFID array on and connected to the computer.