Can anyone speak to the viability of using a projector pointed down at a screen on a table for maps? Has anyone done this? I've seen other projects, including in this forum, for LCD TVs lying flat on their back. Anyone with specific experience with either of these two want to comment on how well they work in practice?
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Playtesting Fugare Draconis, an epic tale of adventure, loss, and redemption
I don't have experience using projects for this particular purpose but I imagine it'd be a bit inconvenient. Either the lights are bright and the projector's visibility is reduced, or the lights are dim and people are straining to look at their character sheets or dealing with bright tablet screens.
I only have a limited experience with this but plan to utilise some version of it in the future. My group had an old LCD TV with the back panel taken off so that it could lie flat. It was an odd ratio, though, something like 21:9, so it was awkward to work with given that most battlemaps tend to be a standard 16:9 widescreen size. It was also a little bit on the small size only being about 30-odd inches.
The primary issue I had was with scaling. I either had to severely crop a battlemap in order to get anywhere close to 1" scale for miniatures, which in turn made the effective area of the battlemap ridiculously tiny, or I had to scroll, which in turn meant that miniature positions needed to be moved. What was worse was that regardless of which solution I used, the effective area for a battle was just too small; it ends up being about a 10" x 12" grid, or thereabouts. You can essentially run off the map, from one end to the other, in one turn.
Given this, I'm aiming for a minimum of a 42" screen if I end up using an LED TV in the future. Apparently 42" is the sweet spot for scaling and using many of the animated battlemaps you can find on YouTube and which can be utilised with various options (I forget the name of one of the sites, but it recently had a Kickstarter) to add in a fog of war.
Having said all that, if my budget allows, then I'm going to do something way better than either an LED TV or overhead projector: an under the table projector!
There was a reddit post a few weeks ago about a competition where a team of builders/coders put together a gaming table from scratch. They used a short-throw LED projector with an interactive function (these are mostly used in classrooms as more versatile blackboards). They coded a rudimentary feature to read miniature movements and reveal fog of war, as well as read dice rolls on the table and convert them into a small character sheet, also projected onto the table with touch functionality. It was fairly basic but **** it was cool. I'm lucky enough to have in my group two programmers, an engineer, an artist and myself, who is very crafty, so I'm going to make it a project for the whole group once I get the funds together.
Can anyone speak to the viability of using a projector pointed down at a screen on a table for maps? Has anyone done this? I've seen other projects, including in this forum, for LCD TVs lying flat on their back. Anyone with specific experience with either of these two want to comment on how well they work in practice?
Playtesting Fugare Draconis, an epic tale of adventure, loss, and redemption
I don't have experience using projects for this particular purpose but I imagine it'd be a bit inconvenient. Either the lights are bright and the projector's visibility is reduced, or the lights are dim and people are straining to look at their character sheets or dealing with bright tablet screens.
I only have a limited experience with this but plan to utilise some version of it in the future. My group had an old LCD TV with the back panel taken off so that it could lie flat. It was an odd ratio, though, something like 21:9, so it was awkward to work with given that most battlemaps tend to be a standard 16:9 widescreen size. It was also a little bit on the small size only being about 30-odd inches.
The primary issue I had was with scaling. I either had to severely crop a battlemap in order to get anywhere close to 1" scale for miniatures, which in turn made the effective area of the battlemap ridiculously tiny, or I had to scroll, which in turn meant that miniature positions needed to be moved. What was worse was that regardless of which solution I used, the effective area for a battle was just too small; it ends up being about a 10" x 12" grid, or thereabouts. You can essentially run off the map, from one end to the other, in one turn.
Given this, I'm aiming for a minimum of a 42" screen if I end up using an LED TV in the future. Apparently 42" is the sweet spot for scaling and using many of the animated battlemaps you can find on YouTube and which can be utilised with various options (I forget the name of one of the sites, but it recently had a Kickstarter) to add in a fog of war.
Having said all that, if my budget allows, then I'm going to do something way better than either an LED TV or overhead projector: an under the table projector!
There was a reddit post a few weeks ago about a competition where a team of builders/coders put together a gaming table from scratch. They used a short-throw LED projector with an interactive function (these are mostly used in classrooms as more versatile blackboards). They coded a rudimentary feature to read miniature movements and reveal fog of war, as well as read dice rolls on the table and convert them into a small character sheet, also projected onto the table with touch functionality. It was fairly basic but **** it was cool. I'm lucky enough to have in my group two programmers, an engineer, an artist and myself, who is very crafty, so I'm going to make it a project for the whole group once I get the funds together.
"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."
― Oscar Wilde.