iPlay

iPlay makes multiplayer party games accessible for anyone by turning your phone into a controller and a computer into a game screen. No game console needed! Less setup, less hassle, more fun.

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Inspiration

Our goal in creating iPlay was to deliver game night, without the hassle. I’m sure we all have memories of getting together with a group of friends and playing party video games like Mario Party or JackBox late into the night. What makes these games harder to access, though, are the needed prerequisites to play. Having to go out and buy a console, setting everything up, not having enough controllers for everyone to get in on the fun. That’s why we set out to deliver an experience that is playable by anyone, anywhere, using technology that’s already sitting there in your pocket.

What it does

iPlay turns your iPhone into a controller and your MacBook into a game screen, enabling quick and convenient access to multiplayer party games. Your iPhone is an immensely powerful piece of technology, allowing itself to have more features than the regular controller. We use the phones motion detection, camera, keyboard, and touchscreen to give users access to a diverse selection of unique games. We offer 5 games: Infected, Spectrum, Dog Fight, Chain, and Emoji match.

  • Infected: Use your phone as a joystick to play tag and be the last man standing
  • Spectrum: Given 2 extremes (ex: Bad Movie ... Good Movie), guess where another players hint lays on the scale between the two extremes.
  • Dog Fight: Use the motion detection capabilities of your phone to steer your plane and shoot down other pilots.
  • Chain: Make a chain of related words to get from one word to the next: (eg: Start word: Book, End word: Forest, Example Chain: BOOK → PAGE → PAPER → TREE → FOREST)
  • Emoji Match: Use your phone's camera to take a picture of your face trying to match a given emoji. Everyone votes on who's face matches the best, and our AI bot EmojiBot may give you an extra vote if you do a good job! ## How we built it We used SwiftUI to make a multi-platform app that is available on the Mac and on the iPhone. To ensure a seamless connection between the mac and the iPhones we used the Multipeer Connectivity framework. We used a bunch of cool frameworks to add features to our games and to utilize the power of our iPhones, such as AVFoundation, SpriteKit, NLEmbeddings, CoreML, CoreMotion, and more. ## Challenges we ran into Juggling all of these new and powerful frameworks was one hurdle. Also, making sure that the Multipeer Connectivity connections between the phones and Mac were strong and had low latency was no easy task. ## Accomplishments that we're proud of Being able to make the games, and then finally playing them with other people was very rewarding. We are proud of the fun that our games have brought to us, our friends, and other users. ## What we learned We learned a lot. All of these complex Swift frameworks taught us a lot, not only about the frameworks themselves but about networking, ML, and physics. ## What's next for iPlay We plan to add more games, improve our current features, and to become a fun option for friends on game night.

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