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This RFID Poker Table one hell of a cool project. You can now play your Sunday night poker game and invite spectators to watch on a big screen. While the cost of the system would surly place it out of reach of the casual poker player I can see this being a hit in bars and clubs. Is this the next standard in game play? What the system needs next is integration of RFID chips! "The inspiringly-named Video Poker Table makes this possible. Beneath it’s perfectly ordinary looking exterior is a fairly impressive collection of electronics that uses RFID technology to track the movement of playing cards around the table, and superimpose this information on a video feed that’s generated automatically from 4 cameras in the table. We play with a standard deck of KEM cards that have been tagged with 52 RFID ’smart labels’ - thin and flexible enough that while they’re plainly visible they don’t affect the way the cards shuffle, deal or handle on the table. This game data, along with the camera feeds, is transmittted to a Windows PC via a USB cable and processed by a software application I wrote. The end result is a live, fully edited video feed of all the action, with pretty good quality graphics that show players’ hole cards, the board, and context-sensitive statistics during play. At the end of the game, the video is chopped up into individual segments, one segment per hand played, named according to the players in that hand and their cards, compressed and uploaded to a web server that players can later access to browse and play back individual hands. All of this happens automatically without any human intervention." Thanks Andrew!
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September 5th, 2008
This is very cool!
Would the use of RFID pose the risk of another player essentially hacking the interface? Using the RFID to determine where cards are or something of that sort?
September 5th, 2008
I could see that Stainless. If it were a high stakes game some players would intercept the data packets and have a tiny heads up display built into their glasses so that they would know what hands all of the other players had.
September 6th, 2008
It’s worse than that. You can just read the IDs yourself, no need to intercept anything that he’s done. Seems like you could just read the cards with a directional antenna of your own, depending on exactly what RFID technology were used.
It’s a novelty and couldn’t be used for anything serious without some serious work. Just look at it as a “I did it because I could”.
Anyone with good proximity and an appropriate directional antenna (say, embedded your eyeglass frame) could potentially snoop the cards unless they’re encrypted non-repeatably within the RFID tag. I kind of doubt that any standard-issue RFID tagged cards are this sophisticated yet. Some better tags can already do this though, from what I understand.
I’d never play on this table for anything but nickels.
September 6th, 2008
However, for blackjack this makes a whole heck of a lot of sense, and *is* already being done commercially.
September 10th, 2008
Video Poker Table makes this possible. Beneath it’s perfectly ordinary looking exterior is a fairly impressive collection of electronics that uses RFID technology to track the movement of playing cards around the table, and superimpose this information on a video feed that’s generated automatically from 4 cameras in the table. We play with a standard deck of KEM cards that have been tagged with 52 RFID ’smart labels’ - thin and flexible enough that while they’re plainly visible they don’t affect the way the cards shuffle, deal or handle on the table.