If you’ve spent some of your time during the Great Social Quarantine of 2020 playing games like Dungeons & Dragons over video chat, there are tools like Arealm to enhance that experience.
What No One Tells You About Online D&D
One little-known knock-on effect of last year’s lockdowns was a significant surge in interest in board and tabletop games. D&D in particular had its most popular year ever, with thousands of new players jumping into games via Zoom, Hangouts, Discord and other video chat programs.
That, in turn, has fueled a market for various programs and utilities designed to make “virtual D&D” flow better, which is where Arealm comes in. In addition to providing helpful tools like a virtual dice roller, the marquee feature lets players impersonate their D&D characters on-screen via augmented reality.
“In Arealm, it starts in your normal video chat,” said Antony Tran, co-founder of Foundry Six, the company behind Arealm. “It’s like lenses on Snapchat, where people use it to turn themselves into potatoes or something. Our idea was, ‘Well, can we just cosplay people?’”
