Pepa Deck - Interactive cards

The idea to start the pepa deck project was inspired by the rise of popularity of card games on mobile devices, especially Blizzard's Hearthstone. I wanted to find a way to harness the new innovative possibilities for game mechanics that can come out of digitalization of games, yet at the same time enjoy the benefits of traditional card games, namely, sitting around a table with a group of friends for the purpose of socializing and having fun. To do so, I wanted to create interactive cards.

An initial version of the cards was created as part of a rapid prototyping class. The write up for that class is available here. The basic idea behind interaction with the cards is to forgo touchscreens which would cause a player to feel too cautious while holding the cards, in favor of very simple bending gestures. A demo game made for class called "spider catch" involved two cards, and a spider appearing randomly in one of the two cards. The player bends both cards to start playing, then bends the card with the spider to get a point, bending the wrong card or not bending quickly results in losing a point.

pepa logo

Following version 1 of the prototype, I have concluded that:

Pepa Deck Concept

The concept behind the Pepa deck (PEPA standing for Paperlike Entertainment Platform Agents) was presented as an extended abstract in CHI Play '18 Work in Progress session. This abstract presents the concept of using independent interactive cards, each with its own bend sensor and display, connected via an ad-hoc network to a central device such as a tablet. The abstract suggests 6 scenarios in which this kind of system can enhance card playing. It also touches on the possible components of the system.

Citation: Nurit Kirshenbaum and Scott Robertson. 2018. PEPA Deck: Bringing Interactivity to Playing Cards. In Proceedings of the 2018 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play Companion Extended Abstracts (CHI PLAY '18 Extended Abstracts). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 479-486. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3270316.3271521

Bend Events

I have started researching the topic of events in bendable devices, thinking that it is a necessary step towards an environment that allows creators to design games for bendable cards. There are currently several approaches to events in bendable devices, touched on in my extended abstract in ISS '18 Work in Progress session. This abstract presents an exploratory study that motivated my desire to look into bend events, a suggested model of events, and examples of usage in applications (see video below).

Citation: Nurit Kirshenbaum and Scott Robertson. 2018. Define, Refine, and Identify Events in a Bendable Interface. In Proceedings of the 2018 ACM International Conference on Interactive Surfaces and Spaces (ISS '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 345-350. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3279778.3281461

The next videos showcase a lengthier segment that was cut from the official wip video.

The device used in the exploratory study is better shown in the images below, as well as the concept behind the implementation I suggest and the state machine used in my code.

pepa device bend events concept bend events state machine