Earlier this year we wrote an opinion piece about the iPad suggesting that it would make an incredible board game platform, “Imagine a Scrabble iPad game that used iPhones as letter holders. You could hold up your iPhone so that no one else could see your letters and when you were ready to make a word on the Scrabble iPad board, you could slide them on to the board by flicking the word tiles off your iPhone.” Guess what? There’s a Scrabble iPad app that does exactly that, including using iPhones as tile holders.
Considering how expensive the iPad/iPhone Scrabble setup (aka multimodal multi-touch gaming) is it seems ridiculous but as a concept it’s very exciting and over time will become a lot cheaper to produce. Several universities are experimenting with multimodal multi-touch setups including a team at the University Duisburg-Essen who created the ‘Poker Surface‘, and a team at the Texas A&M University who are working on a card game with iPhones for individual hands and an iPad for public information and play. Watch the videos below to see what we’re on about and why we’re so excited about it.
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