I recently became re-obsessed with chess again and decided to try a sensor board, since I’m embarrassingly, extremely bad at basic board vision and thought I might make fewer errors with real pieces. (This is actually true. I still suck horribly and blunder pieces away in embarrassing ways, but I do it marginally less.) I’ve picked up two: the Chessnut Go and the ChessUp 2.
I strongly prefer the ChessUp 2’s independent wi-fi integration with chess.com and full-square lighting. However, I find it much easier to see the pieces themselves on the Chessnut Go’s white-and-gray board. This seems like an “unnecessarily bad” part of the ChessUp’s design.
The color black, by its nature, swallows light and produces little reflection or contrast. Black chess pieces are most visible when they are either a silhouette against a lighter color, or when they are not actually very dark. I think ChessUp 2 either needs a substantially lighter color for its dark squares and frame so the black pieces stand out more, or a substantially lighter color for the black pieces themselves. Lower contrast white pieces (relative to the light squares) are less of a problem in a real-world chess set, since light colors eagerly reflect ambient lighting and emphasize their shape and position by the shadows they cast against themselves; all this contrast is swallowed up on dark black pieces.
Brighter ambient light minimizes this, but I am in a poorly-lit computer room on a matte black desk that barely has space to fit the ChessUp 2, with the furthest row of pieces inevitably in shadow from my overhanging absurdly large computer monitor. Obviously, this is not an ideal place to play chess, but if I was making the kind of decisions that don’t lead to a small townhouse crowded full of unnecessary electronics, I probably wouldn’t have bought the ChessUp in the first place. I am a walking ADHD stereotype.
Anyway, I think it’s likely that many of your potential customers have similarly poor lighting and crowded spaces. Maybe y’all could consider a future revision or alternative “edition” of the hardware that lightens up the color of the board, the black pieces, or both? If you offer just an alternate color for the black pieces, you could sell that as an optional expansion kit for existing users.
It might be kind of bad for battery life, but if you implemented “background lighting”, an option to illuminate every square at low brightness when it is not highlighted for some other reason, I’d use it. That might be a way to alleviate this without having to invest in manufacturing a bunch of new stuff.
Something an Amazon review for some version of the ChessUp mentioned was difficulty telling the queen from the king at a glance because they both have 8-lobed rounded hats, which they fixed by painting the cross on the king’s crown. I did this (with opaque metallic gel pens, not paint, but it works pretty well) and this did help a good bit. I’ve considered decorating all the pieces in the kit with metallic ink emphasizing the most unique aspects of their shape, but frankly I’m not convinced it wouldn’t just look cheap and tacky, so I’m holding off for now, but if I get more frustrated with visibility I might do it anyway.
Anyway, I’m enjoying the kit – just wish I could see it better!