S. Stickert, H. Hiller, F. Echtler Companion - A Software Toolkit for Digitally Aided Pen-and-Paper Tabletop Roleplaying ACM UIST 2018 Adjunct Proceedings (bib)
	We present Companion, a software tool tailored towards improving and digitally supporting the pen-and-paper tabletop role-playing experience. Pen-and-paper role-playing games (P&P RPG) are a concept known since the early 1970s. Since then, the genre has attracted a massive community of players while branching out into several genres and P&P RPG systems to choose from. Due to the highly interactive and dynamic nature of the game, a participants individual impact on narrative and interactive aspects of the game is extremely high. The diversity of scenarios within this context unfold a variety of players needs, as well as factors limiting and enhancing game-play. Companion offers an audio management workspace for creation and playback of soundscapes based on visual layouting. It supports interactive image presentation and map exploration which can incorporate input from any device providing TUIO tracking data. Additionally, a mobile app was developed to be used as a remote control for media activation on the desktop host.e present SurfaceStreams?, an open-source toolkit for recording and sharing visual content among multiple heterogeneous display-camera systems. SurfaceStreams? clients support on-the-fly background removal and rectification on a range of different capture devices (Kinect & RealSense? depth cameras, SUR40 sensor, plain webcam). After preprocessing, the raw data is compressed and sent to the SurfaceStreams? server, which can dynamically receive streams from multiple clients, overlay them using the removed background as mask, and deliver the merged result back to the clients for display. We discuss an exemplary usage scenario (3-way shared interactive tabletop surface) and present results from a preliminary performance evaluation.
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