I remember there being, at some point in the 00s, many projects with projectors shooting at a touch-enabled frosted glass tabletop from below. Those looked really cool and futuristic. That was when large LCD panels were prohibitively expensive, too, so they had no choice but to use a projector. Yet somehow, all these projects have disappeared despite all the advances in display technology. Why?
It sounds cool, but probably not very viable product. I see several problems:
* big, unwieldy, works only a centrepiece of a "game room" and there is a limited number of people interested and able to set up such room for themselves
* lack of tactile feel - in general it would feel closer to an "electronic entertainment" than a board game
* limit of a 2d field - there are many things that you will not be able to do easily - like drawing cards from a deck and showing them only to individual player
* lack of content - board games are physical products with all the rights attached - you'd have to license each and every one of them before adapting for your specific brand of game table
Using it purely to display the static board surface would be pretty neat, though. You could scale it up larger, have decorative animations, etc.
If you really wanted to make it a statement piece, you could integrate a 3D printer and a card printer, and have it produce physical game pieces and cards on demand.
Well the Microsoft Surface had to be killed so they could reuse the name.
Really though, I think it's a hard product to get good enough to sell. You'd need to do a lot of polishing, but it's going to be expensive and have low sales, so it's hard to recoup the r&d. And no matter how much you spend, I think you still end up with different visual impact of looking at a screen vs looking at a board on a table. I bet there's some really nice experiences possible though. Setup and cleanup would likely be way faster.
There seem to be quite a few models of 55"+ 4K touchscreen available (for thousands of dollars), so I think that product type is still available. It's the middle sizes that are missing; I've been waiting for years to upgrade my 24" 1080p Dell touchscreen to 32" 4K or similar, and if that existed for less than say double the 24" price I'd probably buy several.
I was following some of these back then and the main reason they died off is once you assume everyone has a phone you can do much of the work on the phone itself.
And then the pieces/map itself isn’t that complicated to do “for real”.
