The Challenges of Adding AR to Tabletop

Image Recognition and Art

Augmented Reality (AR) really brings Rift Zone: Contact to life. The terrain of Proxima Centauri B rises out of the terrain tiles in beautifully 3D art while the tactical heads up display projects movement and attack ranges into the real world so you can easily see what is possible without the use of a ruler. Of course this beauty and function only really works when the physical and the virtual come together correctly. Here at Boosted Reality we’ve learned a lot about what things in the real world have surprising impacts on how, or even if, the AR works as expected.

Let’s start with the terrain. It’s easy to describe; recognize an image in the real world and then place a virtual 3D model on top of it. Then just send that location to all the phones playing the game so they can have a shared game board. It turns out things can go wrong even before we start!

Computer image recognition doesn’t work like human image recognition. For a computer to recognize an image it first needs to define the features of the image that make it unique. These features are areas that are easy, and fast, for it to identify and are usually things like sharp corners, high contrast changes in small areas, and knowing the precise size of the real world object. That last one is only critical when using them in AR, more on that later. The more of these items the computer can find in a picture from the camera the more likely it is to match the target image. When the confidence is high enough we call it a match.

Enter the conflict between the artist and the developer. Of course ‘conflict’ is the wrong word because Keely is a master of his craft as well as an avid fan of Rift Zone: Contact. We all have a shared goal. However, due to the fact that Proxima Centauri B orbits a red dwarf and is primarily covered in organic, fungal (well, lichen but that’s a different blog) we gravitate towards lots of organic curves in lower contrast images. The first version of our Fungal Forest tile could not be recognized by the computer because it lacked contrast and definition. Keely did an amazing job of keeping the theme but adding both contrast and sharp edges.

Keely now leads a set of part-time artists and has provided a style guide on how to fit in our universe. However, he is still the go-to for art that needs to integrate with AR. 

We can’t wait for you to lay out your first game board and admire how beautiful the tiles are before seeing them perfectly matched with the 3D versions in AR. 

Check back soon for the 2nd part of this series….