ePawn Arena entails digital elements to make gaming more interactive

The just concluded CES 2012 has brought us many fresh tablets, gaming devices and video games. But ePawn Arena is a new gaming accessory that revives the traditional board gaming in an innovative way. In fact, the Arena is a digital board tabletop from ePawn, a French firm. The 26-inch. figure-based gaming board brings you the likes of Dragons and Dungeons with the help of ePawn’s patented real-time object-tracking technology instead of expensive touchscreen. Despite of touchscreen and RFID, the ePawn Arena gaming board is super responsive and it recognizes little figurines quite superbly.

ePawn Arena

The ePawn Arena can be hooked up with any of the computing devices like a smartphone, tablet, PC or whatever. The CEO of ePawn, Christophe Duteil is hopeful that customers will buy the gaming board even in the era of high-end small gaming gadgets and video games. The traditional gaming board still has much demand, says Mr. Duteil, who brought the Arena all the way from Paris for demo at CES.

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ePawn Arena

Digital board games

In form, ePawn Arena resembles Microsoft Surface. But it combines the conventional board gaming and electronics gaming in a superb way. Of course, it makes the Arena a different stuff on display at CES. Spectators have been excited to have a look and place hands on this advanced electronic board for some touch of traditional gaming.

ePawn has done everything to make the gaming board affordable. Instead of expensive touchscreen technology, the company has made use of its own magnetic tracking system. Of course, the innovative tracking system can read the location of tagged figurines and other objects excellently. Notwithstanding the touchscreen, the device’s screen is highly responsive, indeed.

There is no processing done in the gaming device. The software is a run off of the computing device connected with it. However, it is not clear how ePawn can successfully turn a monitor into a gaming platform. It will be a challenge how the Arena can run the advanced games developed for touch-enabled devices. The sophisticated boardgames rely on menus for gameplay, settings, options and advancing between players. According to ePawn’s CEO, the tagged objects can themselves trigger menus and they can also be used to select options. To an extent, the challenge can thus be met.

Anyway, as of now, only a few games are available for ePawn Arena. This challenge could be solved once developers support the platform with many games. ePawn has announced an easy to use free SDK to help developers create games for the platform. Developers will have to adapt their user interfaces to the gaming board and its tagging system. ePawn plans to sell the Arena for just $400. The figure-based gaming board will land in stores late this year.

Via: Dvice