What would you want in a HoloLens Dungeons and Dragons Game?

james_ashley

What would you want in a HoloLens Dungeons and Dragons Game?

Should it be 1) a first person dungeon crawler or 2) something that augments a pen & paper D&D game? Should 3D terrain and cave walls rise up around your hex map? Do your D&D figures move on their own? Do stats hover over the figures? Can the dungeon master throw info from his hololens into your hololens?

And don't pretend you're too cool for D&D.

ADefWebserver

I would think: 1) Self-contained 2) Multi-player - Basically something that looks like the holo Chess game in Star Wars episode IV

EgoAnt

Having the map on the floor with fog of war being revealed by the DM would be awesome. The DM could sweep his hands to reveal areas to the players. Oh! Imagine if the DM could just hold the map in front of them, have the HoloLens scan it and then project it onto the floor for everyone else.

For the DM it would be cool to have a quick NPC / Monster maker that appeared only to them, then they could bring those characters into the world.

For everyone it would be fun to have a dice selector that let you roll huge oversized dice into the room. Like dice the size of basketballs that would bounce around off the furniture.

Ash

I see an isometric map that appears on the table in front of you, unknown areas hidden by fog (as suggested above).
You have animated character 'pieces' (customised by their player) which you can place correctly as per normal D&D. They can have simple animations (each controlled by their own player) so when checking for traps they look around, when in melee combat they are waving their weapon etc. Stats definitely can be called up as required (voice command?).
Would be amazing to see simple dungeon/town/wilderness scenes on the table in front of you with your customised character wandering around it. Poly count could be really low and it would still be fantastic.
I am assuming this is remote play D&D so around your table sit life size avatars of your player friends (head tracking enabled).

This seems like the kind of application perfectly suited to the Hololens' strengths. So much so that I wonder if they are already considering any partnerships with RPG board game companies (the Cthulhu ones would be great too).

(I could even see a mini industry where 'professional' Dungeon Masters charge groups of friends to run their campaigns - who wouldn't want a game run by Adam from D&D Is For Nerds?)

Uh, I mean... D&D? Never heard of it.

james_ashley

AdefWeb,

HoloChess -- yeah. I think all AR ideas ultimately lead back to Star Wars Episode IV.

EgoAnt,

Fog of war. Brilliant.

Ash,

The Jedi Council playing D&D. I like it. Remote play hadn't even occurred to me and would be awesome.

I wonder if instead of one app, you could release D&D modules each as separate apps with network play. Release The Temple of Elemental Evil one month. Then a few months later when people are ready release Ravenloft. I have some old object recognition code I was using with the Kinect but having to look at a display screen didn't make sense. I need to dust that off, now.

Going back a little further, does anyone remember this D&D demo for the Surface table 1? Does anyone still have a Surface 1 table?

Ash

We use a Surface table as part of a permanant multimedia exhibition for our company's archives. It's fun (especially with coded objects that you put on the table and it brings up info about that object locked to its position). Never seen that usage for D&D - love it.
I might mock something up when the Hololens emulator is up and running. Wave 4 is just way too far away...

Is there any place/way for people in this community to share Hololens apps to try in their emulator?

james_ashley

It's UWP so you can 1) side-load these apps if you redistribute on onedrive or something. 2) share source on github. 3) I think Windows Store has a test mode so you can preview with select users.

BluePotato

I think I've read that holograms disappear when closer than 1 meter from the Hololens. Makes us have to rethink all of those board game ideas.

Ash

I think it's closer than that (I recall they recommend not going closer than 0,85m and somewhere closer than that they disappear). But you wouldnt have to be that close for this to work. I'm thinking like the onstage Minecraft demo. And you can move/interact with your figure by gaze (not 'touch') so I think it would be fine.

BluePotato

Here's what I found in another article:

"At an apparent distance of one meter, virtual objects rendered by the HoloLens will begin to fade out, and they’ll actually disappear as they close to 0.85 meters away."

Source: http://www.pcworld.com/article/3039822/consumer-electronics/we-found-7-critical-hololens-details-that-microsoft-hid-inside-its-developer-docs.html

Since we don't want partially faded-out holograms, I think we have to keep our holograms 1 meter or farther. If a person sits at a table with a tape measure from his/her eyes, they're unfortunately going to be far away from the elements in any table/card game.

BluePotato

I was thinking of developing a simple Connect 4 game in Unity to learn the new platform, but it would have to be a meter away from me at a table. At the normal size of a Connect 4 board (maybe 12 inches wide?), I think users would want it to be closer.

My next thought was, how about just making it larger?

My subsequent thought was, why not have a giant 5-foot tall Connect 4 hologram board that sits on the floor instead of a table?

I'm leaning towards that route.

The animation of those chips bouncing off my floor, sofa, and chairs when the "chip reset slider" is hit would be entertaining, if anything!

james_ashley

When a player reaches in to move their D&D figure this would get them inside the 0.8 M range, but when they lean back it should be okay, I think. D&D tends to get played on big tables.

Games like chess, go, etc. in which you lean over the board would be more difficult to augment unless you change the conventional layout like @BluePotato suggested. Great idea, Blue!

Ash

I think the 'clicker controller' is going to be very important. As much as I am sure the initial brief was 'Hololens must use solely gaze, airtap and voice control' I just don't think that will cover everything. The ability to use a small device to either point or use a simple trackpad to move something you have already selected will be too intuitive to do without.
That way you can look at a virtual gameboard and easily and accurately move/manipulate the figures.
(I've realised I'm talking like this project is actually in development or something)

james_ashley

@Ash,

I've already started white boarding it in my head and have a mental Gantt chart going.

HoloGloves would be cool. I've only tried controllers for Vive and Playstation VR but they both made a huge difference. You really need to be able to do something with your hands or else you start feeling off-kilter, I think.

(I think it's similar to the way children explore the world by putting things in their mouths. When you watch people, they are always playing with their hands and picking things up and putting them down and playing with their hair. We don't really recognize this cognitive behavior unless it occurs to us to start looking for it.)

Jimbohalo10

Take the 3D print files for D & D from http://theindiedragon.com/
And find a way to convert them for HoloLens use them to stroll around 3D. In the game just needs a program to convert mesh/STL files instead of 3D printer to a unity 5 image conversions file, the load and test in HoloLens emulator

Ash

When you watch people, they are always playing with their hands and picking things up and putting them down and playing with their hair. We don't really recognize this cognitive behavior unless it occurs to us to start looking for it.

I think this is a great point and incredibly important to both VR and AR. It is a constant process of ensuring you are engaged with the environment - like the tiny mouse movements people constantly and subconsciously make to confirm they are still interacting with the system.
I have used Vive and Rift controllers and in both instances I kept moving my hands and glancing at them to check they were 'still there' and i could still interact with stuff.

For all the current focus on the HMDs I think the next stage will be on a whole range of simple input devices.
Our interaction with the world is a combination of visual and tactile - VR and AR should reflect this.
The strength of VR and AR is how it replicates our experience of being 'in' a digital world much more 'realistically' than traditional screens - yet a disconnect I am seeing is for VR and AR to want to make our vision also be the 'input' (gaze control, gaze menus etc) so we don't have to use our hands. But this is not how we normally work (first thing everyone does on putting on a VR headset is hold up their hands even though they know they won't be able to see them).
Simple physical input devices will be crucial (I am imagining some kind of small disc like a trackpad and a single button on a device inside the middle finger - maybe a scroll wheel to move the 3-d cursor towards and away from you...)

james_ashley

In a similar vein, have you ever noticed when using Leap Motion with the Oculus that after a while, you start believing you can actually feel the objects you interact with? I think this is because we receive all the other clues regarding touch (visual, collision, physics) that our brains just fill in the missing sensation. It's another way to solve the problem of a lack of tactile feedback -- we can create the illusion of tactile feedback if decent hand tracking were available for HoloLens.

I think though that this would require changed to the API -- either 1) add a hand tracking service to the APIs or 2) unlock the raw feeds so someone else can plugin their own hand tracking algorithms.

EgoAnt

Wait.... One meter? That's unfortunate. I was hoping you'd be able to pick up and manipulate objects a lot closer than that, like with Leap Motion affixed to a VR headset.

james_ashley

@EgoAnt,

Fortunately that's wrong. I got some clarification in another thread. 1 meter is the min distance for comfort but holograms are still visible even at around 10 cm -- which should be okay for brief periods.

EgoAnt

@james_ashley Thanks for clarifying! That's much better.