Polygon Magic’s Microsoft Surface Style Gaming Hardware

Polygon Magic, the studio behind Bleach: Shattered Blade and the Wii port of Ghost Squad, is dabbling in video game hardware. They created the G-Panel, short for Grid Panel, which resembles Microsoft Surface.

The G-Panel has a huge touch screen and it can recognize special cards printed with an invisible dot code. Card reading arcade machines like Lord of Vermillion and Sangokushi Taisen are old news in Japan, but Polygon Magic is using cards in a different way. In one tech demo a card is used as a breakout paddle and in another demo, unfortunately titled “have fun with balls”, cards act as platforms to catch falling marbles, similar to the falling sand web game.