Hey all,

I have kind of an odd question for you all.

I have been enlisted to help out some people create a giant pong simulator.

Similar to this

http://www.ponggame.org/

The basic idea is that there will be two people both rigged up with some kind of motion sensor, they will be the right and left pong paddle.

Thier movements will control the paddle. If they run a certain way the paddle will go up, and the opposite way will make it go down.

It will be rigged to a giant TV screen which they will be looking to as reference for the ball. The game will score as normal, 1 point at a time. It should also have some manual controls to override.

So my question is what kind of tech/ tech companies could I look in to, to achieve this.... its so random I have no idea where to start

Any help would be greatly appreciated... or if you need me to clarify anything just ask

Thanks all!

Sounds like a fun project :) My first thought is to have each player wear a belt with infrared LEDs on it, and put two IR cameras in the center of the field to watch them, and calculate their positions by finding the bright spots in the video data. Either that or put the LEDs on their heads and a single camera above the field, if there's a convenient place to hang it.

Either way, it would be a lot like the wii remote and its sensor bar... except in that case it's the camera that's moving.

Thanks Deku, it will be pretty cool

Like I said we are still in the spec stage where we try to figure out the best approach. An infrared LED would be a cool way to accomplish... do you think there will be any problems with range? Or signals dropping out?

Thanks Deku, it will be pretty cool

Like I said we are still in the spec stage where we try to figure out the best approach. An infrared LED would be a cool way to accomplish... do you think there will be any problems with range? Or signals dropping out?

At least if I'm understanding correctly, won't the players be staying within a set space? I think it would be pretty reliable, provided your lights are bright enough. Also if you go with belts, you'll have to account for arms going in front of them and blocking some percentage of the LEDs from the camera's view.

I'm not so sure about having the players wear electronics that might break when dropped or lose connection to their battery. Especially if they are to run around to get to the ball, looking at a screen instead of where they are running. I'd rather give them a helmet, stick some retroreflective tape on it and put a high power IR spot next to the cameras.

I don't think the players will typically be running into things or rolling on the ground or anything. Just running back and forth in an open space. But your idea of reflection is good too. No batteries needed then. Hopefully it would be bright enough. The more surface area you can get covered in reflector, the better. Fully coated helmets with camera above would probably be most effective, but may be a bit gross to share if it will be something that people cycle through playing all day, sweating from running...

I heard that some people working with IR and virtual reality filled a gym with IR beams.

You could also use cameras and require the players to wear something type of green screen clothing. Using special clothing required less equipment to test. Green screens are used in movies all the time to be something that can be tracked by the camera so it can be replaced by Computer Graphics...

You just need good lighting but this might not mater too much cause you are just going to be tracking and not video editing

When you say "Outside simulator", do you actually mean outdoors? If so, that is going to be a problem with all of the methods mentioned so far. IR, ultrasonic sensors and camera-based movement sensors all suffer from interference in the best of situations. There would be virtually no way to prevent unintentional sensor inputs from background interference in an outdoor scenario.