[Noisebridge-discuss] Two-way optical interface?

[Ari Lacenski]

I'm a terrible go player, but I sure like LEDs...

Most go sets that I've seen have matte black stones and polished vitreous
white ones. It would be worth getting a few cheap photodiodes, placing one
next to an LED with a very focused view angle, and seeing if you get
measurably different output from [no cover; reflectance from black stone;
reflectance from white stone].

Daylight might ruin this whole plan; choosing a photodiode responsive to
only a certain spectrum would help. I recommend NOT choosing the IR
spectrum to play with.

It might not work at all, but little cones of light spilling from the edges
of stones sounds like a lovely game.

Or you could hack up a two-color monome <http://monome.org/> with
the buttons at crosses.

Ari

On Thu, Aug 23, 2012 at 4:35 PM, Sai <sai at saizai.com> wrote:
> After playing go with y'all a few times at Toorcamp, I thought of an
> idea for a modified go board - namely one that's 100% normally
> constructed, except that it would have Things at the crosses.
> (Potentially it could also have them at the centers of squares as
> well, if you want to have a board that could be used for other games
> too.)
>
> The utility: you could have physical play-by-email/server games (with
> the local player just playing stones as normal, and being prompted for
> where to play opponents' moves; you could have useful teaching cues,
> like highlighting dead groups; you could have entirely novel kinds of
> games.
>
> The Things would need to
> a) output light of different colors, and
> b) determine what color stone (if any) is on top of them
>
> Ideally the output light should work as a kind of halo around a normal
> stone; possibly one could use clear or clear-cored stones instead,
> though I think that harms aesthetics.
>
> I'm not sure how to make such a Thing, though (and really, making
> hardware is not at all my area of expertise, so I'm just guessing here
> in the first place). If it were output only, I think that LEDs or
> fiber optic cable would be reasonable. But how do I test what stone is
> on top of them, especially if we assume unaltered stones?
>
> I can imagine that it may be possible to have the fiber optic go on a
cycle:
> 1. transmit a burst of test light
> 2. receive the reflection, classify it to determine stone that's on top
> 3. transmit actual display light for humans (most of the time)
>
> I'm not sure if this is actually possible or not though; I know
> nothing about fiber optic hardware capability. Any suggestions?
>
> - Sai
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