Pong and augmented reality married, spawns Ping!

What happens when you bring the old, nay, ancient together with the new? Well, you get something that is far out, of course! Remember Pong back in the day, when you controlled a paddle just to deflect an incoming ball back at your opponent? Such a simple premise, and yet it held your attention for hours on end. Fast forward to today and you have augmented reality technology seeping into our lives, so what happens when you merge both of them? That’s exactly what Niklas Roy has done, with this PONG! Augmented Pixel game. The game sports a solitary video input that obtains a live feed from a video camera, while a video and audio out will connect it to a TV.

Paddles will not be used, as your hand will substitute it instead. The white ball that you see on the screen will bounce between two white lines, where it will interact with the dark object in the video feed which is represented by your hand. Of course, you can use other items such as your fingers or anything with adequate contrast. Too bad this version has no score tracking mechanism – that’s the only downside to some fun that we can think of.

Edwin Kee
Categories: Gaming
Tags: ar, Augmented Reality (AR), ping, pong