Résistance

• C#
• Unity 3D
• Android
• iOS
• Augmented Reality

The origins of the project:

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:

• 1Ideally, a full session was set to be carried out over an hour of class (actually 55 minutes).
• 2Targeted classes often had more than 30 students and the game was designed for 6 players. Although it is possible to compose teams of two students, it was preferable to limit the maximum number of players, for comfort. So in order to allow an entire class to play for an hour, it was necessary to make between 4 and 6 parallel play groups. This therefore represented a very important job for the teacher that had to follow 4 to 6 groups in parallel.
• 3The game rules being quite elaborate, it was necessary to find a way, complementary to the accompanying booklet, to make students / players understand the rules as soon as possible. Moreover, that way needed to be available to each student, at any time of the game.
• 4Finally, with a view to a national publication of the game (which eventually did not happen) it was important to find ways to "nationalize" the events, locations and characters highlighted during a game.

The app:

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 ).

What's next ?

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).

• Date: 2016
• Skills: Unity3D - C# - Augmented Reality