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Show HN: ChessBoss – enhancing physical chessboards with computer vision (devpost.com)

83 points by yeldarb ↗ HN
We built ChessBoss at the TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon this week. It didn’t make the top 10 but I thought Hacker News might think it’s pretty cool.

https://devpost.com/software/chess-boss

There are these really cool smart chessboards that can suggest moves and track your games... but they’re $400 and weigh 19 pounds. And of course there are apps that can analyze games but tracking and inputting games by hand is a huge pain. Or fully-digital chess apps... but board games are way more fun in real life!

We wondered: “why can’t you just do that in software and bring the best parts of chess apps into the real world?” So we did!

A camera passes a feed of the board through our machine learning model which interprets the state of the board and passes it off to Stockfish to display move suggestions in real time.

We didn’t quite get to recording the state over time in PGN but we hope to continue this project and add that soon!

Would love to know what you think. We’re working on enhancing other board games with computer vision as well; if you want to help us beta test sign up at https://boardboss.com

36 comments

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yeldarb
We built ChessBoss at the TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon this week. It didn’t make the top 10 but I thought Hacker News might think it’s pretty cool.

There are these really cool smart chessboards that can suggest moves and track your games... but they’re $400 and weigh 19 pounds. And of course there are apps that can analyze games but tracking and inputting games by hand is a huge pain. Or fully-digital chess apps... but board games are way more fun in real life!

We wondered: “why can’t you just do that in software and bring the best parts of chess apps into the real world?” So we did!

A camera passes a feed of the board through our machine learning model which interprets the state of the board and passes it off to Stockfish to display move suggestions in real time.

We didn’t quite get to recording the state over time in PGN but we hope to continue this project and add that soon!

Would love to know what you think. We’re working on enhancing other board games with computer vision as well; if you want to help us beta test sign up at https://boardboss.com

Also I live tweeted about our progress during the hackathon so if you’re interested in how the sausage is made you can check out the blow-by-blow here: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1179424684502388736.html

psuter
Congrats! We tried something similar a few years ago (also at the TC Disrupt Hackathon [1]), but had to take a lot of shortcuts to get to something working. I'm impressed you had the time to train a proper model (we went with old school CV hacks).

Looking forward to seeing what BoardBoss could become. These days I've been wanting a CV app to track backgammon games. Those dice can be pretty tiny though :)

[1] https://devpost.com/software/chesseye

yeldarb
Thanks!

ML tools have definitely come a long way in the past few years! We used CreateML for our first pass which is great for prototyping; you just give it your training data and hit go.

Unfortunately it’s not particularly transparent or tweakable. If it doesn’t do the job well enough you you’re out of luck and have to switch to another tool completely.

Edit: cool project!

rocauc
Great minds! Love that you deployed to a Pi – I’ve thought about the same to complement or replace smartphones.

Can you shed some insight into your ML process? One thing we did to simplify the vision problem is capture images from the same perspective (hence our tripod). We labeled 2894 objects across 292 images. We had 12 objects to detect: each piece for black and white. We struggled with occlusion, especially if a pawn is behind a queen.

ngcc_hk
Sorry no mood but that seems to be a project I would like to do but for WeiQi/Go ...
yeldarb
Nice! What software features would you like to see added to those games?
karmakaze
I also want a Go game recorder. No features just a game recording to have the enjoyment of playing with a real board and still have the game file for later review.
thom
Really glad to see a few projects like this recently. For teaching it's _so_ good to be able to quickly help kids analyze a position (even when you have no real right to be teaching people chess) without blundering. I do think the loop needs to be closed with better, more explainable chess engine analyses on the other side though, but this is fantastic for a hackathon project!
rocauc
So, as we think about making this into a production app, a feature you’d request is the ability for a user to add input as to why a given move is being suggested?

At present, we’re simply outputting the recommended move from StockFish, which also does give a “Why.” Perhaps letting users add that commentary in the app sufficiently solves that need.

thom
Oh I'm not sure I'm making a practical suggestion here, I think it's a tremendously hard problem to humanize engine outputs (quite often the answer is just "because otherwise in five moves you lose your knight" etc). Some people have attempted this:

https://decodechess.com/

malux85
Wow this is cool! Any plans to open source it? This is something I'd love to hack on.

If not, anyone else wanna work on this together? email me (in my profile)

yeldarb
We’re thinking of doing a kickstarter to fund making it into an actual product if there’s enough interest.

But I’d love to chat more about what you’d be interested in building! I’ll follow up with you.

malux85
Reach out, I’m connected to funding. We may be able to help.
ospohngellert
This would be an awesome tool for streaming :)

You should also consider posting this on the chess subreddit: http://reddit.com/r/chess

rocauc
We think streaming and creating game logs will be great features to add.

We’ll likely share to the 147k /r/chess when we have an app others can demo. Good call.

Aspos
Would suggest using two cameras for stereo photogrammetry. Using mini-projector to highlight clues would also be cool.

I see a micro-projector with two cameras just 10 cm apart on a single tripod. With stereo the tripod does not need to be that big for reliable detection.

yeldarb
Ooo cool idea!

Have you seen Tilt Five? It’s an AR headset that operates off a similar concept. Instead of trying to figure out the passthrough optics they put projectors in the glasses that reflect back at the viewer.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tiltfive/holographic-ta...

Aspos
Having to wear bulky glasses would ruin boardgames for me. But I see your point.
TylerE
At that point why bother with a physical board? There are tons of free chess apps that will happily run on a tablet or PC with out all this faffing about.
yeldarb
It’s way more fun to play board games in real life than on apps; trying to combine the best of software with the best of physical games.
TylerE
Sounds more like the worst of both ... have to set up all those connections, power, still need a PC, but lacking the convenience.
levischoen
Where’s the code?
mhuffman
> We plan to launch a Kickstarter to get funding so we can turn this into a real product to enhance Chess for people playing in the real world.

I expect it is not available!

billforsternz
This is very cool. One very important application would be simply recording competitive games. There are electronic boards that can do this, and they are ubiquitous at top level events. But they are infeasibly expensive. At our chess club one selfless and heroic volunteer inputs all the scoresheets into a PGN every week (shameless plug: he uses my chess GUI, Tarrasch https://triplehappy.com). But it takes something like 5 minutes a game, and gets tedious after a while. I have thought about trying to build a phone app to compete with the electronic boards, but who has the time? You guys do!
yeldarb
Yes! Absolutely on our road map.

We were hoping to get this done at the hackathon actually but it turned out our v1 model wasn’t stable enough to track the game state over time. Hopefully v2 of the model will let us do this.

An added bonus over tracking it by hand is that a computer vision powered version would be able to track the time taken for each move as well.

If we built this would your club be willing to help us beta test?

dangero
Would love to see something like this done in augmented reality so you point it at a chess board and it gives you info about the game in progress.
yeldarb
Check in later this week :)

(Not chess but I think we’re on the same page!)

mustacheemperor
This inspires some nifty applications for headset/eyeglass AR. I second the request for source code, it’d be great to play with this on something like the vuzix or HoloLens.
tonyinthehouse
This could be very useful for building your own chess bot! I am definitely going try this out when I have some free time.