Table Foosball Update

With it being my last week here at Matmi, we figured it was worth having an update on the table foosball. The main changes we wanted to make since the last update was the addition of a top-down camera, and an update to the display graphics, we decided to move into Unity for ease of design, once I got my head into it I found that it was significantly easier than positioning everything in HTML as I’d done in the previous build.

Above is the first build I made in Unity as I was learning how to use the canvas UI features, we knew we wanted the camera feed to be the focus with the rest of the information sat around it. As you can see from the pictures once we were happy with the general design of the main screen we completely overhauled the UI, Lawrence and Phil have been working to give it a much cleaner look than my paint.net assets. We had a few ideas for what style to go for, whether it be a serious Sky sports-esque design, or a retro football cartoon display with colourful characters. The design we’ve gone for reflects the energetic, fun, and frantic nature of table football, with a set of stylised player icons to choose from.

We also got ourselves a HD webcam and a long usb extender to hang it from the ceiling beams for the top down camera, with the features in Unity this only took a few lines of code to implement. We feel that a camera feed makes the experience even less insular than before, something I found when researching professional table foosball was the lack of visibility for the people watching the games. The audience had to stand on benches to get a look around players and at the actual table itself, with the display people can see exactly what’s happening in real time.

From here we have a few ideas of where to move forwards, completing the interface by adding animations to the start screen, goal celebrations, and extra customisation to game length and goal limit. If we decide to turn the table into an exhibition piece we want to add tablet displays onto the table for the players, and a booking system in which you take your own icon picture. But as always we are welcome to any recommendations for how we should develop it further!

A lot of interest has come from various companies doing exhibitions and are looking for something to stand out from the crowd.We are looking forward to seeing our creation in the public domain. If you would like to have a demonstration, please get in touch.We are currently in talks with several leisure brands about bringing our Hacked Foosball table to the masses.

Table Foosball Update

Prototype Video