Detection technology on Board is much more robust. The MS Surface FTIR approach was lovely, but so over-featured no one could imagine a scoped-down (ie. cheaper) version of it.
Aha, so there are ex-Surface developers working on this too! That's reassuring actually. Yeah, the boardgame demos of Surface were gorgeous, and I was definitively disappointed that this cool technology didn't "arrive" even as the years went by. Wishing you all good luck, and I may have to see how hard it is to get my hands on one of these...
To give proper credit: I don’t work at Board now, I just helped them explore the board game piece detection space over a year ago. The tech has done great work since then, really robustifying the detection algorithm and making experiences native to it.