Happily continuing work on https://cardcast.gg. It's a way for my friends and I to play Magic: The Gathering online using a webcam. Spelltable has been neglected by WoTC, and we wanted more features, so I rolled my own (and learned some Computer Vision stuff in the process!)
Most recently I rolled out automated card tracking, so there's no more need to click on cards to know what they are, they just automatically scan on a set interval.
I also moved over to using livekit for the service, and man, I should've done that sooner.
If you play MTG, I'm looking for more people to come give me feedback and contribute. Feels like something others can benefit from!
I've been continuing work on cardcast.gg. It gives you the ability to play Magic: The Gathering with your friends remotely using a webcam.
In the last month or so I added a few nifty features:
- Auto-scan functionality: Instead of having to click on cards to discover what they are, I can now do whole-frame detection on an interval (configurable), so players can mouse over the webcam stream of another player and automatically see what the actual card is. Super helpful for deciding who to attack and makes turns quicker!
- Card view is now grouped by player, since auto-detection will populate a lot of cards during the course of a game.
- Switch the video stream to Livekit from my homebrew version. Players were having video trouble and I hope Livekit is good enough so solve that problem.
Next up: I really want to build a community around this, and I'm struggling on getting the word out to people / having them try it out. I've done some SEO and word of mouth advertising, but haven't had much luck. I feel like I need to switch directions a bit. I'm a developer by trade, so this is wholly new to me.
Thanks boreal! I have it on my feature request list. I'm currently using a custom WebRTC + Websocket implementation for connections that I wrote without having this feature in mind, so reworking that will take some effort. Currently focused on client-side inference (runs in the user's browser), followed by continuous tracking (think: Snapshot the entire frame every 5s so all players know what cards are on the board at any given time). Will probably get to that in the next week or two!
If you ever want to follow along or play a game, feel free to hop on Discord (link on site)!
Actually actively exploring this very topic! I have a feature-flag version where the inference runs via WASM / WebGPU (onnxruntime-web specifically).
My only pause behind rolling this out further is the performance isn't as fast as I'd like (1.5s~ latencies), and the widely varying support for WebGPU / WASM across browsers and OS pairs.
Still testing it out (and learning about ViT performance on various hardware), so hopefully more news on that front soon!
That's a really cool idea! I'm actually exploring a similar concept right now. On the demo page, I have a "Detect Frame" button which will attempt to identify all of the cards (as well as their bounding boxes). You can hook it up to a webcam to try it out that way right from the demo page.
Today, players have to double click on a card in a webcam stream to identify the specific card, but I'm working on doing full-frame detection on some cadence throughout the course of a match (think 1 scan every 5s so you always have an up-to-date board state, remembering past scans).
What would be super-helpful is to have a few frames from the camera or a video from your intended setup so I could test how well this scenario works. The detection is pretty good overall via webcam, it would probably work even better with 12MP.
I think this would be a really cool application. If you ever want to chat about this, I'd love to talk! Feel free to hop on discord (https://discord.gg/axRtvbsfAU) or DM me! (same username on both)
I've been working on cardcast.gg. It gives you the ability to play Magic: The Gathering with your friends remotely using a webcam.
I got back into MTG back during the pandemic after a long hiatus and Spelltable is what brought me back. My playgroup lamented more features and something tailored to our needs, so curiosity got the better of me and here we are. :)
I've never worked with computer vision before, but I went through a whole journey that started with the classical computer vision techniques and ended with recently migrating to the transformer-based models. Been a really cool adventure!
My playgroup has been consistently preferring it over Spelltable and have been wanting more and more features. I would love for people to try it out and start building a community around it! Discord is on the site.
I've been working on cardcast.gg. It gives you the ability to play Magic: The Gathering with your friends remotely using a webcam.
I got back into MTG back during the pandemic after a long hiatus and Spelltable is what brought me back. My playgroup lamented more features and something tailored to our needs, so curiosity got the better of me and here we are. :)
I've never worked with computer vision before, but I went through a whole journey that started with the classical computer vision techniques and ended with recently migrating to the transformer-based models. Been a really cool adventure!
My playgroup has been loving it so far, and I would love for people to try it and tell me what breaks! Discord is on the site.
Most recently I rolled out automated card tracking, so there's no more need to click on cards to know what they are, they just automatically scan on a set interval.
I also moved over to using livekit for the service, and man, I should've done that sooner.
If you play MTG, I'm looking for more people to come give me feedback and contribute. Feels like something others can benefit from!