Arthur Bastos
Beach Pong
About the project
Beach Pong was the product of research questions about immersion in mixed reality environments.
The team was tasked to create a game to investigate player behavior in situations that involved dividing attention between virtual gameplay elements and the real world.
I developed core gameplay design and implementation. This project required integration between multiple devices, such as Microsoft Surface tablets (client), Macbook Minis (server) and Kinects (motion capture).
The game remixes mechanics from the classic game Pong. Players were given foam paddles embedded with tablets to act as their viewport. They physically moved around a sand court to make their virtual paddles move. Multiple Kinects tracked player positions and mapped them in the virtual world. Furthermore, the Kinects also tracked depressions in the sand and mapped them as hazards in the game. It was a clever mechanic to incentivize divided attention.
The installation had features for the crowd as well. The court was decorated with a LED grid that blinked to represent where the ball is in the virtual world. The grid also served as serve as visual cue for the limits of player movement. There was also a top-down view of the game that resambled the old-school Pong game.
Beach Pong was exhibited in an art event called Nocturne. It managed to catch the attention of nearby walkers and create huge lines of people who wanted to play. The experiment also led to two research papers.
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