Project Rudy Games

Over the last few years, the introduction of many new Augmented Reality (AR) devices like the Microsoft HoloLens has greatly contributed to the popularity and more widespread usage of AR. Supported by recent improvements in hardware and software technologies, even common smartphones have now reached the point where they can be used as a viable alternative for some AR features that were limited to more specialized devices not too long ago. Rudy Games, an Austrian company based in Linz, wants to utilize this surge of smartphones with AR capabilities by developing a Mixed Reality board game which improves upon the classic board game formula by adding an AR dimension to it. To accomplish this, the company started the interface2face Mixed Reality Game research project in cooperation with two research groups of the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria, Campus Hagenberg, in November 2017. The goal of this project is to produce a working prototype of such a game which can be used by the company as the basis for a commercially viable product. This bachelor thesis contributes to this goal by defining some fundamental parts of the system architecture of the project. Concerning the hardware architecture, the main question that should be answered was whether typical board game elements like tokens, cards and pieces of a modular board can be used as anchor points for AR content. The results of this evaluation showed that the angle between board pieces (which can potentially be quite far away from a player) and the smartphone held by a player sitting at the same table was too shallow to make a reliable detection possible. Since the detection was otherwise quite good, this problem was solved by introducing Personal Interaction Spaces (PIS). These are placed directly in front of the player and replace the board pieces as primary anchors for AR content. Because they are so close to the player, it is far easier to hold the smartphone directly above them, which alleviates any problems that would be caused by shallow angles. In terms of software architecture, the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern as well as Reactive Programming and the Entity-Component-System (ECS) pattern were all evaluated as potential candidates for the foundation of the architecture. The MVC pattern, which is mostly used for graphical user interfaces, did not show promising results during the implementation of a first minigame. While Reactive Programming left an impression that was a lot better, it didn’t seem to be suitable as the main component of the software architecture either. Fortunately, the results which could be achieved with the ECS pattern were very convincing in all aspects, making it the perfect choice for the foundation of the architecture.