The smart peoples over at Carnegie Mellon University have developed an interactive Dungeons and Dragons experience using Microsoft’s Surface, this walk through shows how a future Critical Hit game might be played.
Surfacescapes Demo Walkthrough from Visual Story TAs on Vimeo.
Stephen Schleicher began his career writing for the Digital Media Online community of sites, including Digital Producer and Creative Mac covering all aspects of the digital content creation industry. He then moved on to consumer technology, and began the Coolness Roundup podcast. A writing fool, Stephen has freelanced for Sci-Fi Channel's Technology Blog, and Gizmodo. Still longing for the good ol' days, Stephen launched Major Spoilers in July 2006, because he is a glutton for punishment. You can follow him on Twitter @MajorSpoilers and tell him your darkest secrets...
12 Comments
Now, that just looks cool. Of course I am guessing this would put a large dent in a one’s pocket. But, it would save on all the paper that is used.
Wow that is pretty sweet. Like Morpheus said though I am almost afraid to see how much it would cost.
We’re on our way to holodecks people.
MAN O MAN!! I just wet myself!! I can’t WAIT!!
Wow, this looks very awesome. I would love to have the ability to see the land, town and things I’m fighting but I love rolling my own d20. That’s not something I want a computer to do for me.
The general consensus from my friends and, it seems, from comments on the product’s site, is that people want to be able to roll their own dice. I agree that I don’t like the dice roller.
If the screen could be designed to perhaps recognize the facet shape (to identify the die in question) and the “down” number (to therefore interpret the “top” number that was rolled, that would be awesome.
Of course, that’s a whole optical recognition challenge in itself. Perhaps there are other ways to work around it.
But the ability to provide both large-scale and combat mapping along with inserted illustrations provides a visual and technical element to the game that is astounding.
I think a few design paradigms need a bit of shifting but, wow, very impressive!
The dice roller SUCKS. The “roll for player initiative” in the example? I couldn’t even tell what numbers were on the d20 (it looked like all 1’s and 11’s) and then when it stopped I couldn’t figure out what was facing up. That’s my opinion on the matter. Plus, this looks awfully cool, but I think it would discourage a LOT of people from ever trying to DM. I, for instance, do not have the patience required to input all that info for the Dire Wolf in the example. Then again, when I played we didn’t even use minis. Combat was much simpler back in tha day. :)
I don’t use minis either but 3.5 combat is hard to gauge things like Attack of Opportunity and many of the special combat feats without at least a grid map.
I think it would require the ability to pre-load monsters. Basically have the Monster Manual programmed in so the DM could pick. That would be nice.
But I think this must remain a tool for the game and not somehow become the game itself. D&D is about creativity, imagination, and role-playing, not grids and stats and technology.
Make the display round, put it in your space ship and let the wookiee win!
looks awesome.
It’s always a good idea to let the wookie win. But why does he always want to play bard or paladin? Charisma isn’t the wookies’ best ability.
I like it because it could potentially allow our old gaming group who have scattered to the Four Winds play simultaneously through a DSL connection.
Didn’t TSR have an in-house idea to solve that problem on the way? I really don’t know any more than that, and I read that before they launched their premium online ‘compendium’ thing, so take what I say with many grains of salt! :)