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play electronic board games on your cozy floor

LCD projector pointing down
  (+7, -2)
(+7, -2)
  [vote for,

There are lots of board games that you can play on the internet or PC, which have neat-o features that you just can't get with a physical box set. The problem is that they all lack that cozy feeling you get when sitting on the carpetted floor with your friends or family. You can't typically all sit around a monitor the same way, and projections on TV's or walls seem too "business / powerpoint" like, where you are all facing the "thing" and not facing each other.

So, let everyone gather round in a circle, facing each other, and put the LCD projector on the ceiling, pointing down. People could use simple posterboard as the screen on the floor, or they could use wood, or other materials to warm it up.

Higher-end versions could offer 1 meter square touch-screens that you could project on, so that it's also an input device.

You could also have a special remote that would rotate the whole projection (not projector, projection... through a custom video-card setting) 90 degrees so that the board automatically faces the active player.

sophocles, Dec 08 2004

Baked http://www.d20srd.o...s/mapProjection.htm
at least the fundamentals... [dbsousa, Aug 25 2005]


       wouldn't it be easier to use a horizontal LCD screen as the board?... as you alluded, shadows would be a problem (due to players hands, game pieces etc...) and moving the projector seems a clumsy way of solving this problem.
xaviergisz, Dec 08 2004

       There are laser keyboard projectors that turn an ordinary table into a qwerty keborad for palm tops. This could use the same technology so you could actually move the pieces "by hand".
Belfry, Dec 08 2004

       The Sony Metreon in San Francisco has a thing in the lobby area that kids love, it's a projection just like mentioned here, but includes a camera sensor so people can interact with what's being projected. I saw two kids playing an air-hockey style game by stomping on the puck as it came near them.   

       So, this is baked technology. The marketing for the home is another matter. I mean, where do you hide the projector? In the chandelier? Those things aren't small.
junglefish, Aug 25 2005

       they dont have carpet in my wing.
benfrost, Aug 27 2005

       I am undecided as to whether this is a corruption of board games, one of the few non-electronic bits of family fun left in the world, or a humanisation of computer games into something better. I'm coming down bun, but only just.
wagster, Aug 27 2005


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