Online Chess With Physical Pieces On a Chessboard

D4C5CE writes "A chess-playing German tinkerer has contrived (and made a video of) an amazing contraption that plugs real chess pieces into the freechess.org server using a 20W LED projector and an old webcam to read moves on a projected chessboard."

Re:Lightning chess

[Main Gauche]

Most of the games played on freechess.org are 'lightning' games, and usually its the 'fastest' setting of "1 0"

Most? I'm logged in right now:

Lightning games in progress: 24
Blitz games in progress: 331
Total in progress: 473

Re:Opponent moves?

[JWyner]

Most of the physical "chess trainers" you could buy 10-15 years ago would move the computer's pieces automatically. I think the point of this article is that there is a DIY system presented that can be easily connected to the existing gaming infrastructure. Sure, you could design a piece of hardware that moves the opponents pieces and links up to the public servers, with wifi, but that would not be an inexpensive DIY project anymore.

Re:Opponent moves?

[Doc Ri]

you mean like this:

http://www.ismenio.com/chess_mb_phantom.html [ismenio.com]

Re:Lightning chess

[Vellmont]

Heh. Most games are lighting merely because they play a lot of games because of the short length of a game.

Most PEOPLE are actually NOT playing lightning games, and most games in progress are not lightning games. The percentage of people playing lighting games would tell you a hell of a lot more about the popularity of lighting games than the number of games.

Re:Good hack

[v1]

it kind of looked like he may have been pressing a button on the side of the board when it was time for the next move. His hand always returned to that position and moved a bit. after each move from either side.

I also saw that "oops" of pushing the pawn too far, obviously there's an undo function there somewhere or he had not yet released the move.

I thought the adding of the clocks to the board was a very nice touch. But looks like the room was darkened and no place to put one's legs under the table while playing. two minor drawbacks.

Not like Microsoft Surface at all

[D4C5CE]

Actually he says in his project diary [diy-community.de] (in a forum where they usually take TFTs apart to rebuild them into things like these [diy-community.de] or even one's own R2D2 [diy-community.de]) that quite contrary to Microsoft's approach, all his web cam looks for are the pieces' shadows on the board cast by ambient light.
No need to detect more than that, the server knows which chessman comes from a particular square.