[vitovito]

Not the OP, but in the TechCrunch Disrupt launch, founder Brynn Putnam says, "capacitive material manufactured into the pieces."

If you put capacitive material in a unique pattern on the footprint of each piece, and the rest of the piece material was conductive enough to carry your body's charge to register a touch, the shape of that touch could be unique per-piece.

There's no mention of syncing pieces, charging pieces, keeping pieces in view of a wide-angle camera, anything like that, so that's my bet. (This would also mean moving a piece using a non-conductive material would be a way to cheat by having it not get registered!)

I just shared this on LI this morning, linking back to a video showing showing related touchscreen explorations I did for a colleague in early 2013, sensing different coins by their radii as you touch them: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/vmiliano_a-vertical-triptych-...

[nicoles]

This is nearly bang on correct. The pieces don't contain any electronics or sensors, they have a conductive pattern built into the surface using specialized materials and a manufacturing technique we developed in house. Our custom software stack processes the raw data from the device's touch sensor using embedded ML on the NPU, which detects and tracks the pieces in real time.

That said, the device can detect the pieces whether you touch them or not. Touching them absolutely does change the response, and we pass that along as a parameter to the SDK.

Your coin exploration is seriously cool, please hit me up when you're next in NYC!

[pstuart]

> they have a conductive pattern built into the surface using specialized materials and a manufacturing technique we developed in house.

Would this be something a home 3D printer could do? I'm not a maker but I could see the value of others being able to quickly build a universe of playing pieces if that was possible.

[doctorpangloss]

Have you played the zAPPed games?

Should Mars After Midnight be released on Steam?

[1313ed01]

Reminds me of some ~10 years ago I found a dirt cheap game in a budget bin in some store. It contained a few plastic, pre-painted, miniatures, that had some kind of special base with bumps on (possibly in some unique pattern for each miniature?) and then you were supposed to install an app game on a tablet and place the miniatures on the tablet to move them and have their locations (badly) tracked. Seems like it may have been a similar technology, but you only had to pay for the playing tokens and use a standard tablet. Not sure if special hardware is needed for better tracking of enough tokens or if a standard tablet today could be used with the right software?

Game(s) that you were supposed to play was not very fun, in addition to the tracking not working well, as I remember it, but I may still have the miniatures somewhere. There was another game from the same company that I also bought at the same time, but that one was made to be played with a phone camera as some kind of AR game instead, moving some plastic objects on a table, that also worked about as well as the other game.