The Résistance game is a board game created by History and Geography teachers of the Ampere high school in Lyon. For a year, they mobilized their students to create a board game to highlight the actions and actors of the Resistance during the Second World War in Lyon and its surroundings.
As a part of my work, I have been led to imagine digital ways to accompany the use of the game in the classroom. Several constraints have nurtured this thought:
The creation of a companion app seemed able to answer much of these constraints. The purpose of the application was, in particular to lighten the teacher's workload, empower the most students in the handling of the game, understanding the rules and answers to historical questions asked during a session.
The application had to embark:
Concise, specific and clear explanations of the main rules of the game.
An interactive way to answer the questions within the game, if possible with an automatic correction of the answers given.
Graphical, written, audio and video content allowing to localize the game so that it is playable anywhere in France.
The goal being to save time, it was necessary to ensure that searching the actual game cards inside the application was the least cumbersome possible. It is this particular constraint that guided my choice to a technology which I then began to take an interest in: image recognition and augmented reality.
Indeed, what is quicker than passing the card in front of a phone’s camera to get more detailed information (rules, localized content, answers) on this particular card?
The first prototypes of the application were made in Python with the OpenCV library, which enabled me to understand in some depth the functioning of this technology. But limitations in terms of target platforms and performance prompted me to turn to more specialized SDKs ( Vuforia ) and softwares ( Unity3D ).
This app was well past the prototype stage but, as the game itself eventually was not published, I did not go further in its development. However, everything has not been lost because I could reuse all of this thinking and my new knowledge of this technology for my application Augmented 7 Wonders (and other future applications).