Checker Checker

(Project AGDA prototype)

Overview

Checker Checker is a digital assistant that watches a physical game of checkers via a camera. It tracks the game and provides various help and features while interfering as little as possible with the normal physical interaction between players and components.

Guiding Principle

• Be helpful / fun
• Without breaking the analog experience of playing with another player using physical components.

Features

• Alerts on rules mistakes and prompts to finish legal moves
• Visual and audio prompting to limit interruption to least intrusive necessary

Some Technical Notes

• Vision Approach
• Uses OpenCV to do very simple detection of checker pieces:
  • ArUco markers are used to delineate the corners of the board, allowing the system to crop the square board out of the video image, rotate and fix perspective.
  • All the squares of the board are examined for two things:
    • ArUco markers denoting the "King" pieces.
    • HSV (Hue Saturation Value) values that indicate a red piece, a green piece, or an empty black square.

Next Areas for Development

• Improve vision system - HSV color-based tracking is very lighting-sensitive
• Put in more guided interactions for restoring saved games
• Make logic more resilient when multi-moves made.