Augmented Reality Toys.v1 (Work in progress) from Frantz Lasorne on Vimeo.

It’s not surprising that Lego minifigs and inparticular Lego custom minifigs can be use for table games, not just snakes and ladders or chess, but more completex table top war games, such as Brikwars or even warhammer Given that all these boardgames need minature representations and particularly in the case of warhammer, there are multiple weapon combinations, and the pieces are really expensive, it seems only natural that custom minifigs could be used as playing pieces, not only to save money, but also so that different models can be represented simply by using different custom accessories that clip on to the minifigs.

Now consider, video games have taken the boardgame world into the digital arena, but lets face it whilst its visually stunning and looks brilliant, its intangible, and not very interactive with it comes to playing agianst friends, however if you look at this video, you’ll see two Lego minifigs used to represent playing pieces in some sort of video board game. The AR TUI allows for the concept to push forth the virtual parameters commonly used in video games like power, life, magic, experience, attack, weapons etc. The objective of this project is to create an imaginative and engrossing environment while still creating value for old discarded toys. Its kinda like tabletop war-game and a strategy video game coming together.

Frantz describes the game play as follows:

– Each player is equipped with a toy standing on a base  ie lego custom minifig and Augmented Reality glasses (Head mounted display).
– Before the game begins, players can equip their respective lego custom minifigs with different capacities (health, shield, camouflage, weapons) on a limited number.
– Then, players can prepare together the battlefield (game space) with real objects.
– Both players start on both sides of the battlefield and the party can now begin.
– The game is turn-based, players play successively in a limited time.
– They can alternately move, attack, heal, use stealth, protect themselves with shields, switch weapons etc.
– Each weapon has a specific range of distance and a special power.
– Real obstacles can obstruct the field of vision allowing players to hide themselves.
– The goal is to kill his opponent by strategically using all possibilities of game.

what would be even cooler is if each minifig had a chip in their legos, and the board table was made up onf lego studs with LEDs and connectors, this would be amazing as all of a sudden you wouldn’t need the glasses, instead you would have a screen at each end of the playing table with the minifigs stats and abilities and the gaming table with its LEDs would light up to show range and so forth, that would be really cool and equally the concept could be taken to any tabletop board game.