How about combining the smartphone's camera, QR Code and tabletop or roleplaying games. You could make a great application for running a game like Warhammer, or keeping track your character while playing Dungeons & Dragons.
I thougth about the use of QR code. You can store data in the code, but only a small amount; and it's static information, while a characters attributes changes a lot during any game. Not usefull then.
What sort of information would be usefull while playing tabletop/pen-and-paper RPG?
Pen and paper RPG
The tablet is the perfect device for the game master. Although I found some great software (Fantasy Grounds seems to be very close to my ideas), I think time is right for the tablet assisted RPG.
Especially traveling and the 'day to day' stuff can be calculated by apps on the gamemaster's tablet.
The players can keep track of their character on a smartphone app as well. How much stuff is my character hauling, things like sleep, food consumption, health and experience can be recorded.
Combine these two by building a portal where the player app as well as the gamemaster's app can get their information from, so that -after an encounter for instance- the stats/inventory etc. of the player will be updated through the portal. Hell, the player's app could even contain the required dice for the specific encounter and shake his phone to roll the dice, upload the results via the portal to the gamemaster... (although dice-rolling apps are not cool in my opinion...)
Tabletop game
Also, a lot of software is already available to support tabletops, notably Lone Wolf's Army Builder, but that's just for setting up a game.
I was thinking. You have an iPad (for example). A Warhammer application, created by Games Workshop. The app shows the armies, icons and pictures comming from the Warhammer portal.
When you use a unit to attack, select it and provide the necessary parameters and the app will show you the number of dices to throw (or use the app to throw the dices as well). The app will provide Games Workshop with an advertising platform.
But the best thing?
Ever used Nike+ or Runkeeper? It's a portal where users track their running workouts. They share routes and compete on set goals like how many kilometers group A ran compared with group B.
When Games Workshop, or any tabletop company for that matter, creates an app and a community website, they would have tons of information about where players live, what type of units they play. It allows for targeted advertising and promotions. The community would recieve a boost because they can now compete with other players all over the globe on a whole new level. A scoreboard displaying victories for Good compared to Evil, or by faction or race? That would be cool!
Next to the units themselves, the most important thing of the tabletop game is the roll of the dice. I personally don't see a dice-roll application working in this environment. It's just boring!
What would be nice is an app that just allows your camera to read the numbers from the dice and returns the info to the parent application, thus removing the need to type the dice-roll in whatever app your running, because that's uncool too...
So a company could spend a lot of time creating software for a tablet to assist a game, create an advertisement platform and boost the gaming community. The gaming community could create tools or whole platforms to help game-masters and process 'the boring stuff'...
Wouldn't that bring tabletop gaming back somewhat?
