I keep tabs on lots of things on TT and elsewhere in the GMing community, and just recently these three have jumped out at me:
• Since March of this year, when I first posted about the site, NearbyGamers has grown to include over 1,800 players. If you’re looking for players, I recommend starting here — NBG is slick, useful and free, and well worth checking out.
• The Treasure Tables Forums recently crossed a pretty cool milestone, signing up our 500th member. The GMing Q&A board remains the flagship of the forums, where GMs of all skill levels can ask and answer questions about any RPG, conundrum or tricky situation. If you need help with a GMing issue, you can find it here.
• Gaming Spaces, the Flickr photo group I started at the end of April, now has over 30 members and more than 50 photos of game rooms from around the world. If you like seeing where other GMs game, come check it out.
Nearbygamers and TT forums,I just joined on both counts. thanks for the heads up.
after reading more of the available docs, it appears that it recognizes objects via visual markers similar to barcodes, so tagging your minis would be even easier…
or just use on-screen icons instead of minis, i suppose.
I only just saw the videos for MS Surface. I thought the UI was similar to iPhone demo too. Although it looked like they were actually touching the screen in the videos. I do a lot of remote RPG (friends moved all over the worls) and this product has huge potential for that! Although I admit I won’t be dropping 10k for a unit, the wife would murder me!
I’m in IT, so the Surface is something I’m interested in for a number of reasons, but I must admit that if I could get that sucker for personal use gaming would be the first and primary reason!
You could have it recognize minis easily with a a chip in the base from what I’ve read on how it identifies the devices. Imagine putting a mini on the table, and having the system set to identify the mini and then to play a snippet of sound and to play a GUI effeect around the base of the mini when certain actions are taken.
If you made it a bigger surface that 6 people could sit at comfortably you could also have enough room for each player to have a spot for their MP3 player or phone. Store your character sheets on such a device and the table could access the file. Write a program that allows the table to update the file (equipment, hits, stats) and the game could be completely paperless. You could even have virtual dice rolls using the stats in the file.
My mind is just racing with what I could do if I had that table and the API for it! And if the prototype is $10K then that is a very good sign that MS will make it affordable for the everyday consumer if the demand is there.
Kyle: Welcome to the forums!
Provided the surface itself was a lot bigger (the version I saw was about the size of a large placemat), setting something like this up for minis would be awesome.
In addition to what’s already been suggested, imagine putting down your wizard and being able to call up radii for spell effects, distance to targets, LOS and the like — ditto with wargames.
What I would love to see is a HUGE e-ink display on a roll out mat. Hook it into a laptop and you could have an easy and relatively cheap programmable battlemat. Change an image on your screen, then click update, and the e-ink mat updates itself.
Oh yes indeed I would use it for playing games! I just can’t stomach 10k, but maybe 2k I could part with.
VV_GM: With the chip in the miniatures, do you mean the table/surface will have RFID? I guess I missed that bit in the movie/promo. I really think this thing is going be huge.
I updated my nearby gamers profile. The format had changed a bit since I’d signed up (they’ve added taqging), so hopefully it’ll take off.
I finally took down my findplay link– it’s been broken long enough that I’ve given up hope. I’m glad a good successor has come around.