wePoker

wePoker is a multi-player poker game for Android that allows collocated people to play a game of Poker. wePoker does not need a connection to the internet, everything happens using local communication technology. On newer devices, wePoker will even use Wifi-Direct and NFC!

wePoker won the 'best app' award at the V Hack Android Belgium Hackathon in October 2012. You can see a demo at http://bit.ly/wePokerDemo or download the application at http://bit.ly/wePokerapp.

Features

• Nomadic and Spontaneous Poker games!

  • Play poker even when disconnected from the internet or when no free wifi is available. This is much more common than expected: trains, Eurostar, airplane, bus, metro, car, at holidays, at the beach, cafe, ... And those are actually the places where you have spare time to play poker! No set-up or pin code or internet required, just launch the application and start playing with your friends.

• Multi-Device interactivity: max_fun(x)_ { x | x E P{Phones, Tablet, GoogleTV, SmartWatches} }

  • Optimise experience based on available resources at that moment in time. For instance: - Two phones (or more) can start a local game - Add a tablet that can serve as the poker table - The GoogleTV serves as a high-end poker table where the audience can spectate at a distance. Pubs can offer a GoogleTV basestation with the opportunity to win beers! Local gaming with a couple of friends also benefit from relaxed living-room environment. Furthermore, the stable connectivity of a GoogleTV allows users to join a game over the internet if wanted. - A SmartWatch enables intelligent, personalised poker estimates (i.e. what is the probability I can win this game?)

• Interactivity:

  • Incognito-mode: When hiding the phone, your private poker cards will be displayed
  • Curling cards: Obtain the slick physical feeling of curling cards
  • Fold-on-backside: Automated fold when phone is put on its back
  • Swipe gestures: Throwing chips at the table
  • Speech support: Google's Speech Recognition (with Levenshtein implementation to cope with bad recognition results)
  • Talkback: Text2Speech and customized content descriptions
  • Haptic feedback: Immersion's SDK

• Connectivity: Using the latest Android API's

  • With infrastructure (i.e. connected to Wifi):
    • Automated discovery of Poker games on the local Wifi.
  • Without infrastructure:
    • Wifi-Direct: Allows users to set up a local game without any infrastructure required (Android 4.1 or better). Our intelligent priority connectivity layer configures all complex Wifi-Direct settings automatically.
    • NFC: Allows users to join a game by simply holding the phone near the tablet (NFC Beam)
    • RFID: Allows users to scan an RFID tag to join a specific game
    • QRCode: For devices without NFC and Wifi-Direct, we support QRCodes to join a game without having to go to any settings menu.

• Accessibility: we customized our interface for accessibility

  • Check for audio feedback (when the microphone plugged in)
  • Set content description for all UI fields to improve talkback
  • Enforced UI view where all cards are accessible (even if there is a dedicated poker table)
  • Allows visually impaired users to compete with sighted people without game-specific advantages for any side.

• Extra

  • Cheat mode: players can add money on the server view. All players get informed via visual and audio feedback about this sneaky interaction. This allows to customize the money rules.
  • Customize nicknames and avatars
  • Free gaming (no internet required)
  • Open source!

About the authors

wePoker is being developed by the AmbientTalk team at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. We are a research group that specializes in connectivity and communication for mobile devices, especially on a small scale. Additionally, our advances in multimodal fusion allows to maximize the use of a large range of sensors and actuators. Check out our other apps at the Google Play Store:

• weScribble: A collaborative drawing application for Android devices (Play Store Link: http://bit.ly/RZD9kz)
• The AmbientTalk interpreter: An interpreter for our language, AmbientTalk. You can read more about the language at http://code.google.com/p/ambienttalk. (Play Store link: http://bit.ly/HM7Kzv)
• The Midas Engine: Complex Event Processing for Gesture Recognition (http://soft.vub.ac.be/~lhoste/midas)
• The Mudra Framework: Software Abstractions for Multimodal Interaction (http://soft.vub.ac.be/~lhoste/mudra)