I was messing around with the X-Wing AR app on my phone yesterday and a friend brought up how cool it would be if they could implement the same thing for streamed games—the streamers could plot out possible maneuvers, measure firing arcs, and so on. Any thoughts on this? Is it even possible?

Possible, but by then you might as well go with vassal or table top simulator. I mean I get it, the whole idea of the 1st down on football games does make for spectating much easier, but again that is something that the audience on the other end of the broadcast sees, and not something that the players see.

It's certainly possible, but with current tech, I very much doubt it could be made accurate enough to provide meaningful information beyond that which a trained eye can get just by looking.

I think where you're going with it could be done without going the whole way to AR. You really just want the presenters to be able to 'magic pen' on the screen to roughly sketch out future plays.

However...

Having done that presenting job it's not always a good idea to be talking about what players may do in future, what you think they should do etc. It often puts the presenter in the position of sounding like they know better than the players, and then when the players do something it's either "yeah they did the thing I thought they would do" or "I don't know why he did that instead of what i thought he should do". The focus shifts from the players playing the game and how good their moves are, and onto the presenters ability to predict their moves.

22 minutes ago, Stay On The Leader said:

The focus shifts from the players playing the game and how good their moves are, and onto the presenters ability to predict their moves.

These are good points, I was initially excited about the potential. But you're right. Id rather they just spend the effort setting up a second camera for better views of the table.

On the note of presenting, what a fine art is is to talk enough to engage the audience, but not so much you are just talking for the sake of it.

4 minutes ago, Sk3tch said:

These are good points, I was initially excited about the potential. But you're right. Id rather they just spend the effort setting up a second camera for better views of the table.

On the note of presenting, what a fine art is is to talk enough to engage the audience, but not so much you are just talking for the sake of it.

Until you've tried it you've genuinely no idea how tough it is.

Its utterly a skill you can learn, but my god it's tough to begin with - even the cadence of your speech has to change and you're concentrating so hard on speaking differently you've no idea what's coming out of your mouth!

I'd like to see it and have the presenters give their thoughts on potential plays/actual plays. I don't see the problem there? Too many streams I've listened to have literally just been a running commentary "oh he's revealed a 3 bank, and focused, his opponent has done a 2 bank and focused, now to Dice; oh he's rolled 2 hits and a crit, and the other player has rolled 3 evades so no damage, and now it's back to dials" then *silence*. Or just meaningless chat.

2 hosts chatting about potential options and strategy would be much more engaging rather than a running commentary of what I am currently seeing on screen anyway.

Edit: however I appreciate how difficult it is to talk on a stream and know it's a bit of a thankless task at times so getting high level commentary /discussion is unlikely to ever happen.

4 minutes ago, Goseki1 said:

I'd like to see it and have the presenters give their thoughts on potential plays/actual plays. I don't see the problem there? Too many streams I've listened to have literally just been a running commentary "oh he's revealed a 3 bank, and focused, his opponent has done a 2 bank and focused, now to Dice; oh he's rolled 2 hits and a crit, and the other player has rolled 3 evades so no damage, and now it's back to dials" then *silence*. Or just meaningless chat.

Predicting the future is a tricky tightrope to walk, it's a lot safer to talk about options they could have taken once the play is down. It's hard enough to be making the right plays when you're actually invested in the game and following your line of play, it's that much harder when you're trying to second guess what somebody else's line of play is trying to be.

Say you're watching Paul Heaver vs Duncan Howard, who do you have commentating on the stream whose got the chops/confidence to try and call what they're going to do before they do it? The chances are you're going to wind up with a commentator making themselves sound dumb even trying. But then say you get somebody with the status to commentate on the big games, and it turns out they're coming up with better moves than the players are actually making then all you're telling the audience is that the game they're watching is being played by idiots.

You need the right people in the chair to make strategic commentary with authority but also the tact and awareness not to use that to just crap on what they're watching.

Hah, it's a fair point, but I suppose I'd hope anyway willing to try it would go through as many options as they can and it would become clear if the chosen move was "good" or "bad".

I think it's probably an impossible task unless you get really experienced and likeable commentators, but I'd love to hear a bit more theorising from commentary I'm the future. Even if predicted moves are wrong it's still super interesting to hear someone's thoughts on what they expect to happen and why. Probably a bit too need to for most though XD

It is possible for sure, but you need more equipment to do it right and precise. Extrapolating from one perspective is not very accurate and I don't think Realsense has a large enough area to catch an entire X-Wing match, so you are stuck with Kinects which are still pretty expensive and require lots of setup.

Maybe visual only is enough, though, especially if you follow the tendency in this thread to say that just predicting the moves isn't too interesting. Instead what you can do is remove the overlay most streams spend a lot of space on and open all information concerning a ship whenever relevant. Imagine this scenario: It's the planning phase, and the casters are recapping combat. They can now click on the ship they specifically want to talk about, which opens a tab next to it with the pilot ability, upgrades, and ship status. They can now talk about how likely it is for the ship to survive the next combat, what it can do to survive etc. without having to reexplain the upgrades all the time. They also don't need to remember all of them themselves. Since the information can be overlayed temporarily, its readability can be improved a lot, even for smaller screens.

Another useful thing are arcs and range overlays so casters can narrate combat better.

My phone's too old for anything worthwhile...

That is a cool idea, would make streams a little more interesting in the dial/maneuver phase with the commentators able to outline some of the possibilities.