One nice potential for this is that people far away could join in over the internet.
Either one person with an iPhone playing remotely, or another couple of people with iPads/iPhones replicating the board and playing the same game.
I wonder if they've done anything like that.
And the board state could exist on a server somewhere and you could join and leave at any time and play a long running game, and then you open up the opportunity for the iPad to be a Google Maps stlye viewport into a single massively multiplayer game of the Red Alert / Populous / Sim City / Gods styles and the key bit being it's a small living room coffee table device with long battery life and App Store enabled low complexity of joining in.
Cross with Dropbox/Flickr and instead of video conferencing you get a virtual object/image store between you and your (parents/family/friends/whoever). Not in an 'email a picture' kind of way, but in a nearest-thing-to-teleportation way.
Open app on iPad, on iPhone, take picture with phone. Other end of the tunnel opens their app and there's a new picture. All you need then is that 'rebuild a few photos into a 3D model' technique that was going around a while ago and you have a great tech demo. Wonder if it would have any real world desirability... ahh, sometimes I wish I was a real programmer.
You just described Words with friends for the iPhone. You can also play up to 20 games simultaneously. But the problem with playing scrabble online is that it's way too easy to cheat. (www.scrabulizer.com for example). At least in person you can watch them.
Either one person with an iPhone playing remotely, or another couple of people with iPads/iPhones replicating the board and playing the same game.
I wonder if they've done anything like that.
And the board state could exist on a server somewhere and you could join and leave at any time and play a long running game, and then you open up the opportunity for the iPad to be a Google Maps stlye viewport into a single massively multiplayer game of the Red Alert / Populous / Sim City / Gods styles and the key bit being it's a small living room coffee table device with long battery life and App Store enabled low complexity of joining in.
Cross with Dropbox/Flickr and instead of video conferencing you get a virtual object/image store between you and your (parents/family/friends/whoever). Not in an 'email a picture' kind of way, but in a nearest-thing-to-teleportation way.
Open app on iPad, on iPhone, take picture with phone. Other end of the tunnel opens their app and there's a new picture. All you need then is that 'rebuild a few photos into a 3D model' technique that was going around a while ago and you have a great tech demo. Wonder if it would have any real world desirability... ahh, sometimes I wish I was a real programmer.