Livecadia, The Online Arcade
Choosing digitisation
An online version of an offline game. It sounds strange, but it certainly isn’t. Players flock to arcades and game rooms on a daily basis to play fun, physical games. Through Livecadia, ELAUT’s customers now have the opportunity to offer those same games for players at home. “More and more people are on their smartphones. Every shop has its own web shop, and just about every restaurant has a takeaway option – so we can now allow every arcade to also have an online arcade,” – Laurens De Smedt, ELAUT Group.
ELAUT Amusement
ELAUT is an established player in the world of offline games. The company has been active in the industry for generations. “My grandfather sold bumper cars from the trunk of his car in the 1950s. In those days, claw machines were made with ropes and bicycle chains. He immediately saw the potential and the rest is history,” Laurens says proudly. He is responsible for game & business development at ELAUT Group, and took his first steps in the company. Not only professionally, but literally as well – as he was already walking around the firm as a toddler. “ELAUT is a company that is constantly looking for new innovations and technologies. We listen to our customers and, more importantly, the players!”
A responsive solution
To ensure a good user experience in a solution like this, there should be low latency between an action made by the user through the browser and the visual response of that action coming from the video stream.
How does it work?
Livecadia is a web app that allows you to interact and play with a physical claw machine or other arcade games using your phone. When you log in, you get access to a livestream of arcade games in Belgium. As a player, you remotely control the grappling arm to get a stuffed toy. If you win something, you can either go to the arcade to pick it up, or have it sent your way. The app can also be customised by the client with their own style, so players really feel like they are in their favourite arcade.
The gaming machines are equipped with cameras, allowing you to watch and control everything remotely via livestream. Because latency is a critical component of this platform. Each of the machines is linked to a controller. While a user is playing a game, we setup a direct peer-to-peer connection between the website running in the browser of the user and this controller. This ensures that video frames are sent from the machine controller (which is linked to the camera of the machine) directly to the user. This allows us to provide a low latency (< 150 ms) video stream to the user.
The user actions that trigger machine movements are shared from the browser to the machine controller over AWS IoT Core using MQTT messages.
The platform provides a game workflow that tracks all game events. This workflow and the fraud detection built into the platform ensure that users are not cheating by misusing the direct communication feature.
The platform even allows users to spectate games that other users are playing, which is neat.
Results of the project
The world is changing. That is why ELAUT is constantly looking for ways to use technology and innovation to improve the player experience. “It’s simple. Our clients have a certain number of square metres from which they want to maximise their ROI. That is why it is important to attract as many players as possible. With Livecadia, this is now actually possible. So we continue to innovate and look for new games. Online and offline worlds can intertwine perfectly, and Livecadia is the best proof of that,” Laurens concludes.
About Cloudway
Cloudway is a Scale member and is part of our AWS Migrations & IoT sub committees. They focus on a cloud-native approach, and help organisations combine their various technologies, processes and services to produce an outcome that has actual business value.