Augmented Reality (AR) has been around for a while. The user experience value it brings to games and play is a topic that has not seen much attention. Most AR applications are gimmicky, and often use the technology solely for placing virtual objects in the real world. In our project we aimed to explore what value the integration of AR in tabletop games can bring to the user's play experience. We explored our topic through exploratory prototyping and playtesting, which led to our final board game design: Eye of the Cyclops.

With a group of up to four adventurers you enter the ruins in search for treasure. The only problem is that only the cyclops knows where the treasures are buried. Using a revealing spell, you and your team are able to look through the eye of the cyclops to reveal the treasures, and try to steal them without getting caught.

For the final game and prototype, my main contributions were tweaking the rules and writing the rulebook, designing board layouts, 3D modeling the phone holder and cyclops head, and 3D-printing parts. Before we started working on the final concept, I contributed a lot in the ideating, brainstorming, and exploring phases, and created working prototypes with AR.

With help from our coach, the results from this project have been turned into a research paper that was published at the 22nd IFIP International Conference on Entertainment Computing in November of 2023. The process of transforming the work into a publishable paper was a valuable experience, it made the differences between research papers and design reports much clearer for me.