If you thought that playing Scrabble on your mobile device was considered high-tech, you might want to rethink that. In preparation for the Prague Mind Sports Festival, the organizers have spent a whopping £20,000 building a Scrabble board that comes with some serious hardware built into it. While we doubt you will be able to take one home for yourself, this Scrabble board comes with integrated RGB controlled LED lighting, nine embedded circuit boards and 225 RFID antennas – basically one per square, and specially created game pieces whereby each game piece will have an RFID tag built into them. So why the sudden need for such an advanced Scrabble board? The idea is to that using the RFID tags and antennas and custom software, this will allow the organizers of the event to broadcast the event as it is happening in real time as the system is capable of reading the board in just 974 milliseconds. Whatever happened to good old top-down camera angles anyway? In any case if you’d like to catch the event for yourself, the tournament will be taking place on the 1st of December. More information on the Mind Sports Festival can be found on its website.
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