Editor's Note: Aaron Broder, 16, of Nashville, Tenn., a reporter for the Scholastic Kids Press Corps, blogs at allgeektout.com. He filed this post and video on special assignment for TechFlash.

Aaron Broder

Microsoft is still trying to move its Surface tabletop computer beyond the realm of glorified tech demo into more commercial settings. In the meantime, a team of graduate students at the Carnegie Mellon Entertainment Technology Center have given it a purpose a lot of geeks would enjoy.

A few weeks ago, a video of the Carnegie Mellon SurfaceScapes team's Dungeons & Dragons proof-of-concept began to circulate around the Internet. Although this video was actually intended for only a few people, it managed to attract a lot of attention, as well as a lot of comments. I happened to be headed to Pittsburgh the next day, so I asked to see it in action.

It turns out that the project started when Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins of the Penny Arcade webcomic (better known by their alter-egos, Gabe and Tycho, respectively), came to the ETC and played around with one of the center's Microsoft Surfaces. Whitney Babcock-McConnell, one of the programmers in the group, said “Mike was just sitting there drawing D&D maps on the screen for fun while we were talking about our projects, and then he said, ‘Well, what you should do is make D&D on this.' And so, I just said ‘OK.' ”

SurfaceScapes is an ambitious, semester-long project aiming to create a virtual table for game stores and conventions that can interact with real life “miniatures” -- small models used to represent characters in RPGs. The camera in the Surface is capable of reading special barcodes that can be put on the miniatures, as well as “controllers” that can be used to display a menu when it is a player’s turn. It’s a cool (though admittedly early version) piece of software, with a lot of potential.

Because of their time limit, the team has had to narrow their approach a little bit. They hope to one day expand SurfaceScapes to support multiple tabletop systems, but at this point, they’ve hard-coded in the rules for the current edition of Dungeons and Dragons, produced by Hasbro Inc.'s Renton, Wash.-based Wizards of the Coast LLC.

Whitney said, “The intention of the system was to make it completely generic to tabletop gaming, but as we are a semester-long project, with no guarantee of being able to continue beyond that point, it sort of was necessary to pick on system to target, and D&D 4th Edition was the most natural choice as Dungeons and Dragons is the most popular roleplaying game.”

Although the software is a work-in-progress, the team has some fairly ambitious plans, as can be seen on the project forums, where they are also taking suggestions for ideas. Should they accomplish their goals, SurfaceScapes could change the way some people play games.

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