Gameboard-1 Tech Update From Legendary Engineer Rob Wyatt
Hello Everyone,
This has been a crazy few months and I wanted to personally reach out to all of you and give you an updated account on how Gameboard-1 is developing. We are working on ways to interact in more real-time but until then here’s the latest.
We are busy working on the SDK to allow all of our third-party development partners to make content. We have put a lot of effort into communicating the touch state to various application frameworks and platforms. There is an existing open standard called TUIO and it’s ideal for what we need. Check it out at https://www.tuio.org/. Using this system the core touch data is the same no matter if you’re writing in C/C++, Unreal engine, C# within Unity or Javascript in an HTML application, only the delivery mechanism changes. We have also designed some system components to allow complex touch in an HTML application that is served from the web, enabling web-based games to have gameboard options. Everything from basic touch to high-level contours, detected shapes and objects, all the way down to raw hardware data is communicated through TUIO and developers can access as much or as little of our processed data as they want. In sticking with our mantra of not getting in the way of innovation, if a developer can process the raw data better than we can or they need to process the data in some novel way, for their specific application, then they are highly encouraged to do so.
The fun of what I do is creating what is simply a toolbox of components and then watching how others choose to these tools. We hope to have a full Android SDK in a few months.
What our tools can do! Sense Screen reaction in real-time!
This video shows our state of the art touch system using a simple water particle app. There are some very interesting things going on within this which other touch screens simply cannot do. Initially, there is a block deflecting the water particles but the block isn’t being touched. Even so, we still know it’s there. The pink outline is the contour of what we detect and you can see the outline move as the block moves. One thing we are working on in the lab is reducing latency for these complex interactions. When the hand is placed on the screen, it makes a convex shape that collects the particles, and when the hand is removed the particles fall away. It’s a very natural interaction.
In the lab, we are still working on Linux, mostly for ease of development but now all the touch data is falling in to place its time to move everything to Android. You’ll see a lot of progress on this front in the next update.
On the hardware side, there has been lots of busy work running a lot of numbers and selecting components. We have upgraded the USB TypeC PD system and the battery. Originally it was only going to be 18W PD system but that meant the battery would barely charge while the Gameboard was plugged in and being used. We now support up to 45W (15V@3A) so there is plenty of power to charge the battery while in use. You’ll be able to run and/or charge the Gameboard on any existing PD power supply including battery-powered PD bricks. The battery will be in the order of 20,000mA/h, this will give us the 4 hours of playtime at full power, at lower power settings we should get 6 or even 8 hours of playtime — the screen brightness is the biggest factor in battery life. This is a big battery but we are significantly under the 100W restriction imposed by the FAA for total battery power so there will be no problems taking a Gameboard on an airplane. There will be an end to Coronavirus and when that happens we’ll be ready!
We are doing a second revision of our touch screen glass and will reduce the bezel size from what is on the existing prototype. The size of the bezel (black border that surrounds the Gameboard) is important when multiple screens are put together, so there is a seamless gameplay experience.(Layman’s equivalency of why this is important?) On the mechanical side, the general design is done and we can confirm it will have a removable back so the battery can be easily upgraded or replaced by the end-user.
Exciting things are happening in the lab every day. For everything, I can show that is incredible there are three more things that I can’t show that will blow your mind. More as it happens and we will keep you up to date on as many things as we can.
Stay Safe,
Rob Wyatt
TLG Co-Founder and CTO
