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Smart Playing Cards - A Personal Assistant for Beginners

A Research Demo of the Distributed Systems Group

In contrast to developing new games around the abilities of available technology, we took the opposite approach by augmenting a classical game with new IT functionality. According to our vision, users play a classical card game (e.g., the game of whist) with the usual "look and feel" and corresponding social interactions. Additionally, they are equipped with a small information appliance (ideally of the same size as a playing card) that displays game related information (score, winner) and gives hints (cheat alarm, playing hints).

In our prototype the played cards, marked with RFID tags, are detected by an RFID antenna which is placed under the table and connected to the game server running on a desktop or tablet PC. Each player can then get player-related feedback displayed on a PDA (e.g., an HP iPAQ handheld device) that shows visual real-time comments on the player's moves in real-time.

This demo was created in June 2005.

See also the following related items:

Selected Publications

See the Publications of the Distributed Systems Group page for a full listing of our publications.

Related Student Projects

The following table lists corresponding student projects in our group. Note that some descriptions will be in German.

TypeTitleStudentSupervisorSemester
B Smart Playing Cards with Smart Glasses Michael FranzGábor SörösFS 14
S Erkennungsratenoptimierung beim Smart Card Game Jonas HallerChristian FloerkemeierSS 06
S Mobile Phone GUI for RFID card game Sacha BaeblerChristian FloerkemeierSS 05
S Smartes Kartenspiel mit automatischer Spielstandsanzeige Beat SchwarzentrubChristian FloerkemeierWS 04/05
S Smart Playing Card Remo EgliSvetlana DomnitchevaWS 04/05
S Game of Whist with Smart Playing Cards: Feedback Program Martin HinzSvetlana DomnitchevaSS 02
ETH ZurichDistributed Systems Group
Last updated January 1 1970 01:00:00 AM MET ko