Since the beginning of time, man has yearned to make the idea of sitting down at a table with manipulable virtual play pieces into a reality.
They usually had to make do with making actual play pieces for the actual game that they were playing. Unfortunately, the majority of the boards were only good for one or two different kinds of games and the same went for the pieces. Cards were somewhat better, insofar as it was possible to play many different games with a single (or double) deck, but lose a single piece/card and suddenly you find yourself with useless clutter.
So something where you put on a pair of glasses and, suddenly, the empty card table in front of you has a map on it with all sorts of little figurines is something that I’ve been dreaming of for approximately forever.
In the last couple of years, we’ve gotten closer, though.
Applications like Tabletop Simulator provide a decent enough physics sandbox that will allow for people to play with a handful of tokens (and the DLC available allows for tokens identical to those found in popular board games) and that’s probably about as good as it’s gonna get for the near future.
I mean, until we all get to wear oculus rifts with cameras on the front providing heads up displays and Magic Leap kinda experiences.
So… what are you playing?
(Picture is HG Wells playing a war game from Illustrated London News (25 January 1913[/efn_note]
In the operations I help manage we often have a large area with various orders that are ‘in progress’. One of the hardest things for our supervisors on the floor is to coordinate all of this work in various stages of completion. What I keep suggesting is some combination of RF IDs and something like Google Glass where a sup could glance at the area and see icons hovering above each order that would indicate the status.
Every time I explain this idea to someone they act like I’m nuts. My response is always the same: Clearly you didn’t watch enough sci-fi when you were a kid.Report
Yeah, it’d probably have work applications too.Report
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7rZSRcVM84Report
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxAZbzRpC4QReport
Yeah, but how you going to keep the dudes from camping on product support charge codes rather than making stuff? That’s our problem. 🙂Report
@damon
Not sure I follow…?Report
Our production has manuf guys and engineers. Both can charge jobs/projection and both can charge product support (fixing stuff/ECP/etc.)
We’ve had a lot of problems with manuf/eng guys charging product support for products we’re not currently selling. These guys should be charging value add work, not fixing stuff that no customer has ordered in a year. 🙂Report
Want the article on the warehouse that literally defrags itself?Report