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Comment by vintermann | Hacker News Reader

Not quite the first such product, Microsoft's original "Surface" advertised similar boardgame potential. But if it worked well, I don't know of anyone who was rich enough to try it!

Hopefully the technology has matured since then.

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(Disclosure: I worked on both)

Detection technology on Board is much more robust. The MS Surface FTIR approach was lovely, but so over-featured no one could imagine a scoped-down (ie. cheaper) version of it.

Aha, so there are ex-Surface developers working on this too! That's reassuring actually. Yeah, the boardgame demos of Surface were gorgeous, and I was definitively disappointed that this cool technology didn't "arrive" even as the years went by. Wishing you all good luck, and I may have to see how hard it is to get my hands on one of these...

To give proper credit: I don’t work at Board now, I just helped them explore the board game piece detection space over a year ago. The tech has done great work since then, really robustifying the detection algorithm and making experiences native to it.

I have a first gen surface in storage. Company I was working for wanted to get rid of the heavy as hell awkward thing... There is a backgammon app on it, when i played it years earlier there were physical dice and pieces. Buy lost from my table or not included, but playable by tap as well.

I played games on a Surface table in 2012. It was fun but very finicy with input. I imagine this as 10+ years of better input detection technology.

I think I used there was a Surface used at the "Sum of all thrills" attraction in Epcot in Disney World.

It behaved very similar to the Board. It definitely had a "knob" that you placed on a screen could spin to make adjustments.

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