Gypsy Poker

Mixed Reality Zero Knowledge Poker

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Inspiration

Poker anytime with friends and real cash; electronic cash. Playable soon at https://gypsypoker.pages.dev

What it does

Gypsy Poker is Texas Hold 'em for the cool kids. Start by purchasing your poker chips via cashapp or handcash, then choose a table to play. You have two table options; digital tables- where you play via phone or computer, or XR tables- where you play with real cards using my mixed-reality smart glasses from viim.tech.

In the digital version, you play a classic texas hold-em game from mobile phone or computer. The XR version is an actual physical poker game, with one key difference. The chips you normally have during a poker game, are now electronic chips, and your bets are all made from the smart glass. Players receive notification in their glass when it is their turn, and complete their actions from the smart glass. the physical cards on the flop, river and turn are read into the game via machine learning camera visual card recognition. In both versions of the game, the game state is maintained on-chain using ZK Proofs, and each player's hand is not known or shared on chain until necessary per the game rules.

How we built it

This was built on request from friends in the gypsy community in Miami who play private poker games, and have been using commercial apps like poker bros. I saw this as a great opportunity to explore building a turn-based game on-chain where zero knowledge is particularly useful for privacy, speed of game play in a local setting, and for scalability to an unbounded number of games. The mixed reality component came about late as I was building out my smart glass platform. This demonstration shows how a real world activity or game can be enhanced and made better with electronic cash and Augmented reality.

Challenges we ran into

Building Texas hold 'em is a bit tricky. Thankfully, the web is full of great tools and resources for accomplishing this. My main challenge was to get the game to work on edge servers, thus allowing scaling to an unbounded number of users.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I am particularly proud to have been able to get an alpha version of the ZK turn-based game to work, with actual electronic cash. This makes it a viable real source of revenue given the competitive costs of running game payments. In addition, we can run this without anyone preventing us from doing so (because we are using this for private local games).

Also, through this exercise, I was able to come up with a on-ramp using cashapp that avoids the need to sign up with some third-party services that logs transactions and sells user data on some weird back channels.

Also, through this exercise I realized a use case for my XR smart glasses that I hadn't before considered. Being able to augment real world games with the ability to wager real money makes for an exciting experience that is novel and unique!

What we learned

There are many challenges with ZK Proofs on bitcoin, as well as game state management. By applying my knowledge of network communications in combination with these latest advancements of electronic cash on a platform like smart glass sets the stage for new and exciting experiences that do not currently exist.

What's next for Gypsy Poker

I am currently building a Metaverse Holistic bar and lounge in Pennsylvania, and plan to setup a poker table where you can play the XR version of GypsyPoker. This has opened the door for other uses of ZKP+Electronic Cash within the Meta lounge, such as the lounge club NFC NFT card for easily booking and paying for your experiences and products at the lounge.

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