D&D Microsoft Surface Demo - Hands On at PAX East 2010
April 10th, 2010 | 
Roo
RooWe got a few moments to talk with the team from Carnegie Mellon that's been developing a Dungeons and Dragons tabletop that works with Microsoft Surface - Surfacescapes. They were very informative and also allowed us to play a short demo game that beat the hell out of drawing grid maps with pencil and paper.
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I want one of those!
Oh the applications that it could be used for...maybe incorporating board games too so you don't have to deal with setting up a dozen different card stacks or something.
Or maybe building in touch screen calculators by each corner for games requiring heavy calculating!
The possibilities are endless. Thanks for the great show-case of its capabilities so far. :)
Thanks. I know Boomer was salivating over seeing this video, and I hope it's everything he hoped for. In all honesty, it would be a really fun way to play the game, and it would take a lot of the guesswork and time out of your normal session. There could be an argument made that it takes away from the "purity" of sitting around playing D&D, but I think I could get over that.
Unfortunately, I think it'll be at least a decade before this technology can be cheap enough for any of us to really getting a game table of this magnitude of awesomeness.
Unfortunate that it costs so much.
The technology used isn't very expensive, just unconventional. How often do manufacturers make capacitive (I assume so) touchscreens of that size? The guy in the video mentioned that the processor in it isn't really high-end so an Asus Eee box or something could be used which would cost only about 300.
Strangely enough, things like the iPad and iPhone may make such touchscreens common enough in the marketplace so that tech like this comes down in cost.
Thanks for doing Microsoft a solid, Apple! :)
It's not actually a touch screen that is used.
The technology actually uses a series of cameras to identfy those individual pieces.
The image is rear projected onto the surface.
Here's the website for the table:
http://www.microsoft.com/surface/en/us/default.aspx
Here is the US order form:
http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9686819
If I owned a comic or hobby shop I would probably invest in one or two and heavily promote gaming nights.
I remmebr watching this video a month or so ago. I would love to see one of these in my local gaming Cafe. This would make DM'ing a DnD match alot more itneresting.