Sounds interesting. Though I’m not planning on using these products with this particular project, I’m curious. Is there a distance from a laptop screen that the average person’s depth perception would not be able to distinguish between these 3D images and a human hand? If so, I would want to make a table on which to secure the laptop in such a way that the laptop screen was horizontal. I would also want to incorporate some type of hand-movement recognition system that would control the laptop display. Another option would be to have the computer display a human hand - shot by a small screen-mounted video camera, in relation to the computer generated game pieces.

 

You have to pretty much be looking at the screen dead on. It won't project beyond the LCD edge.

Or you could get a VR helmet, or old Olympus LCD glasses.

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I've never heard of X-Y resistive sheets. Perhaps you need touchscreen grids, keyboard membranes or scrap membranes from auto dashes, game controllers or the like for this project.

 

Do VR helmets have a way of representing the wearer in the display? If so, it would be interesting to find a way to view this display onto a larger screen that could be viewed by a group of people. A lot of work would have to go into rewiring the system to make a group of people and a machine generated image of the game all appear in the display. I could see how such a system would effect group dynamics while playing the game. I'm inclined to think that this effect would be disadvantageous, but I haven't really thought it over that much. I couldn't find the Olympus LCD glasses at Consumer - Olympus America Inc., but if you know where I could find them, I would be interested in doing some more research.

 

The Olympus LCD glasses were crap, as were pretty much all those LCD glasses displays. And yes you can't see anybody around you.

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I still really don't get what you're trying to do. Here's a suggestion, download GOOGLE SKETCHUP (free!) and draw what you need including people & objects. It's really easy to use and many objects such as people are build in or downloadable components.

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The strips wouldn't have to be resistive. Does it make sense that using a bunch of parallel strips would allow the location of a game piece to be located anywhere along each strip? Instead of using resistive properties of each strip to locate the exact location of a game piece along that strip, the location of a game piece along that one strip could be identifying according to where a game piece contacted one of many strips parallel and perpendicular to - yet insulated from, that one strip. I think of a strip somewhat like a line defined on a coordinate system parallel to a y axis. The more strips, the more locations can be identified somewhere on one of these lines. With strips perpendicular to these strips - which are parallel to a y axis, say, defined as being parallel to an x axis, the locations can be narrowed down from be somewhere on a line to a particular point in two dimensional space. Adding strips that are parallel to a z axis could narrow down the location game pieces to a point in three dimensional space. However, this is a bit too much. Right now, I just plan on attaching hinges to a frame in which the parallel and perpendicular strips will be pressed. By doing this, I hope to make a swinging screen that I can place maps under. I am going to look into some of your other ideas.

 

I may not have been able to download the program that you suggested because I don’t have administrative privileges at the public computer that I am working on. So, I drew up something in Adobe. Hopefully, my illustration makes it clear that I am building a game board and not a device for a field game. Basically, there’s this circuit that switches between wires that power meters that – in combination with all of the other meters, is supposed to provide information that can be translated into a location. Actually, the circuit is very inefficient – I wouldn’t even need the relays – or more than one meter, if I used a microchip. It was the best way that I could diagrammatically describe one of the versions of the game that I consider to have more advantages. The grey rectangle is a flat sheet of material with electrically resistive properties that a meter will be sensitive to.

 

I wound up deleting a schematic that I posted in my Wednesday December 17th reply to blueroomelectronics because it wasn’t very efficient - and wouldn’t represent the location of the game pieces accurately. I’d still like to reply to the suggestion that blueroomelectronics made with an improved version of the thumbnail in my 9th December 2008, 11:31 PM post. I think that an even better electronic design might involve coordinating the game pieces not only with a game board with special resistive properties having electrical contacts – from which measurements may be made as a function of electrical resistance from these contacts, but also with contacts with other game pieces from which measurements may be made in the same way. I got this idea from a person who we were studying in a math course who described elements in sets in terms of spatial relationships. Could anyone recommend a design based on this idea, or know the name of this famous person who described these sets?

 

To maintain the flow of any thread it is not a good idea to delete material. When you do any text regarding it in latter posts become confusing.

A better thing would have been to add a note regarding the schematic and leaving it in place.

I do wish you luck with this.

3v0

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I liked it better when there was a time limit on thread editing.

I recall entire threads going missing when the OP got mad.

Is this whole series of threads a school project?

__________________
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Would you like me to repost the schematic before I come up with a new one?

This series of threads is not about a school project.

I have taken 3v0’s advice about adding notes instead of deleting material.

In this case, no one had replied to the thread having the deleted material. Though, I don’t know if anyone was planning on responding to the deleted material.

A site administrator might benefit from your idea of a time limit - especially if your information about the OP’s actions is accurate and OP refers to an administrative position.

 

We have been down the time limit road and it did not work for a few reasons. The one that sticks in my mind is code and schematics. It works well to keep the latest version in a given post, that way people do not have to hunt through a thread to find it.

That makes sense in cases where one is doing incrimental improvement rather the tossing out ideas.

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I have set a deadline for this project. However, I can develop new versions of the game. So, I wouldn’t agree that time is an important issue in this respect. I wouldn’t be opposed to hearing anyone who had any ideas about how to encode information, even if this information was only theoretical. Please explain why you think that schematics are a problem. If we are thinking about the same latest version that involves X and Y strips, then I would disagree for the reason that this model is not as accurate as a model that could describe locations as a continuous – rather than discrete, function. I don’t want to dissuade people for taking an appropriate amount of space to express and clarify their ideas and ask questions. I am open to new ideas as well as incremental improvements. However, I have not considered it necessary to open a new thread for improving different models. So, the hunting that you describe may be necessary.

As for a game that could describe locations more accurately as a continuous function of electricity, would a game having a number of pieces greater than or equal to one and having an electrical design based on Tarski’s world have to have a minimum of two contacts on the game board and one contact on one piece – all having the same charge, in addition to contacts having a different charge on the bottom of each game piece? Or, is there a more efficient way to conserve the number of contacts?

 

I am not a big fan of the resistance based ideas. Other things come to mind.

Have each piece ID'ed by a specific code. Place an LED on the bottom of each peice that flashes that code. Make the playing field transparent. Put a camera under the board to record the bottom of the peices. By comparing the postiion of the lights and the patterns you would know where every peice was on the board.

The expensive part is that you would have to put a battery into each piece to power a little 8 pin energy conserving uC. When you had the bugs out of the system you could have each piece flash a few times to id itself and then shut down after each move.

If you want to use a bit more complex software you could paint a unique symbol on the bottom of each piece and do away with the electronics in them. Always a tradeoff.

--------------------------------------------
I should have qutoed text to provide context.

You are doing fine. My point is that it is good to update code and schematics in place for incrimentaly improved projects. But you are still searching for a basic model and it is a good to keep the various ideas around.

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