The new +Dominion expansion, Dominion: Dark Ages, comes with a very clever trick presumably related to the upcoming online and mobile version.
It includes a card which it instructs you to "hold here" and hold up to the screen of your phone. At first, I thought this couldn't possibly make any sense: NFC isn't super ubiquitous and works on the back of phones. It wasn't telling you to hold it up to the camera, and besides, there's nothing obviously machine-readable on the card. The card isn't transparent and didn't look like it would "line up" with anything on screen in any meaningful way. But, I figured they must have something up their sleeves.
Opening up +Markers, and holding the card up against the screen as directed yields 5 spots. They have some sort of conductive element in the card creating a multi-touch interaction. I'm guessing once the real app comes out, if you do this, it will recognize the particular spacing/configuration of this 5-touch gesture and do something interesting.
It's clever in that it should work well across a broad variety of devices, but is hard or impossible to accidentally trigger by hand, depending how precise the tolerances are on the spacing of the 5 points. I look forward to seeing what the app actually does with it.
It includes a card which it instructs you to "hold here" and hold up to the screen of your phone. At first, I thought this couldn't possibly make any sense: NFC isn't super ubiquitous and works on the back of phones. It wasn't telling you to hold it up to the camera, and besides, there's nothing obviously machine-readable on the card. The card isn't transparent and didn't look like it would "line up" with anything on screen in any meaningful way. But, I figured they must have something up their sleeves.
Opening up +Markers, and holding the card up against the screen as directed yields 5 spots. They have some sort of conductive element in the card creating a multi-touch interaction. I'm guessing once the real app comes out, if you do this, it will recognize the particular spacing/configuration of this 5-touch gesture and do something interesting.
It's clever in that it should work well across a broad variety of devices, but is hard or impossible to accidentally trigger by hand, depending how precise the tolerances are on the spacing of the 5 points. I look forward to seeing what the app actually does with it.
And, +Luis Montes, yes, my thumb is intentionally covering up the ID for the same reason.
http://louspot.com/bgg/touchpoints.html
My reactions to RGG for doing this:
1. I'm impressed by the ingenuity. QR codes would be more standard, but much easier to share electronically -- just take a picture!
2. I'm flummoxed as to why they didn't give any more detailed instructions on the card. At least say "works with touch screens" or "instructions will be on the web page" or something. If I hadn't Googled for it, I might have thrown it out, thinking it was some kind of promo card like they include in Magic booster packs.