Harry Potter fans if you can recall the game of chess from the first movie or book where Harry, Ron, and Hermione had to play an invisible player and the chessmen moved by themselves. Now, two young Mumbai engineering graduates have created a chessboard where you can see the pieces moving by themselves. They call the board, SquareOff.
The idea behind SquareOff is that if you are a chess lover you shouldn't be limited by apps or geography to play a real game of chess. With its physical chessmen that move on the board, the SquareOff board provides a more tangible sense of the presence of an opponent. When it comes to an opponent, a player has a number of options -- one can play a regular old-fashioned game of chess with another person on the SquareOff board, or one can play against an Artificial Intelligence based computer player, or against the SquareOff app, or one can even stream an international match where the pieces move according to the player's moves.
The board has a very clever hardware design that doesn't make it bulky. Under the board, there is a 2-axis robotic arm with magnet, to move the pieces. The algorithm is designed to prevent the pieces from colliding. The board comes with a 2200 mAh Li-Ion battery and an adapter, and a player can play up to 50 games on a single charge.
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