Smart Skat: a Ubicomp augmented card game
Description:
The goal of this project is to augment the classical card game Skat [1]
with Ubicomp technology to facilitate the learning process for beginners
of this rather complicated card game. The Smart Skat game should support the
individual player in the auction ("Reizen") e.g. by suggesting possible values
of his game, to count the current score, to show the cards still remaining
in the game and possibly to support when following suit in a trick.
The above should be realized by equipping the playing cards with RFID
tags [2] and sensing their location with multiple RFID antennas. Each player
is supported by a personal Skat agent, which could be based on a PDA and
presents the information aggregated by linking the physical information
from the RFID antennas with the knowledge about the Skat rules. The challenges
of the project are to successfully address some of the shortcomings of
RFID technology (e.g. false negative reads, limited number of tags that
can be detected simultaneously) in a way that still makes the Smart Skat
game an appropriate tool for the beginner. Most of this requires coding
work, although some hardware issues (e.g. antenna arrangement) also need
to be addressed.
Required skills: programming experience (ideally in Java); no fear
when it comes to hardware issues.
Contact:Christian Floerkemeier
Supervisory professor: Friedemann
Mattern
Lab: Distributed Systems Group ETH Zurich,
http://www.inf.ethz.ch/vs/
[1] http://www.pagat.com/schafk/skat.html
[2] Kay Römer, Svetlana Domnitcheva Smart Playing Cards: A Ubiquitous
Computing Game. To appear in J. for Personal and Ubiquitous Computing
(PUC)
http://www.inf.ethz.ch/vs/publ/papers/smart-playing-cards.pdf