A guessing-game is a game in which the task is to guess some kind of information, such as a word, a phrase, a title, or the location of an object [25]. Many of such games are played cooperatively. In some of them, one of the players knows the answer but cannot tell the others; instead, he/she must help them to guess it correctly. Some examples of famous guessing games include Battleship [20], Charades [9], Hangman [17], Mastermind [15], Pictionary [24] and Guess Who? [12].The Battleship game was invented by Clifford Von Wickler in the early 1900s, and further published by many companies. One well-known variant of the game was produced by 3M in 1974, in a series of eight abstract strategy and puzzle games called “3M Paper Games for Travel & Leisure”, as illustrated in Figure 4.This work presents the design and implementation of an embedded augmented reality game, called MarkerMatch. Augmented reality is a technology that directly contributes to the game interaction experience by enhancing user’s sense of immersion. Current research in embedded augmented reality enables the creation of dedicated hardware capable of executing augmented reality applications. This favors the insertion of augmented reality capabilities in small electronic devices, such as cell phones, handhelds, head-mounted displays and even the development of new ones. The ARCam framework was used for game development, since it provides project designers with all the basic infrastructure needed by the game. Some user tests show that the tested subjects enjoyed the game experience and it proves a point: it is possible to create an augmented reality game completely in hardware with no software involved.Our case study, named MarkerMatch game, has as objective to develop an embedded two-player guessing-game, similar to the famous Battleship game, in which they compete to find the misterious pattern chosen by the game master, which in the case of MarkerMatch is the computer itself.A prototype of MarkerMatch was built using an image sensor and a monitor, both connected to an FPGA. Some ID-based markers were also used. Figure 5 presents the components.
