Physical Pong... moving forward
Just to make the idea more compelling and the experience more enjoyable, we thought that the power-ups (or else "pows") will be triggered by the players themeselves, instead of appearing randomly from the system. This will involve more physical effort; specifically, each player will be "armed" with a plunger gun which she will have to use to shoot down a set of targets, positioned in the middle of the distance between players. Each trarget will correspond to a pow which will appear on the side of the player who managed to shoot this target first. The player will have to use her body to move her paddle near the pow and by using another gesture (e.g. jump up) "grab" the pow and acquire the extra functionality that it represents (e.g., enlarge her paddle). The targets will be common for both players, which means that the player who is more spot-on will get more pows than her opponent.
Some pows will provide the player with extra options which will have to use other body gestures to be taken advantage of. For example, the paddle would be temporarily armed with a freezer gun; the player will have to use a special gesture to activate the gun and aim at the opponent's paddle on screen. If she manages to hit him, his paddle will freeze for a few seconds and eventually gain advantage at this point of the game. Just to make things more complicated (and amusing) the player could unfreeze his paddle by performing a strange and funny combinaiton of body gestures!
Another similar small-scale implementation in which players use some kind of rolling footstool to shift left-right, was developed as a digital art installation in New York. Once more, it has the fundamental differences that we mentioned before.
A probably more closely related implementation is the one used during a Japanese game, where there are two players on each side and are making the kind of "blatant" body gestures that we have in mind for our design idea. They have solved the big projection problem using a large floor-mounted LED screen, instead of a top-down projected image.
These implementations are probably an incentive to look for more innocative design ideas, which maybe related, or not, with our physical polng idea. More on this on the next post...
Just to make the idea more compelling and the experience more enjoyable, we thought that the power-ups (or else "pows") will be triggered by the players themeselves, instead of appearing randomly from the system. This will involve more physical effort; specifically, each player will be "armed" with a plunger gun which she will have to use to shoot down a set of targets, positioned in the middle of the distance between players. Each trarget will correspond to a pow which will appear on the side of the player who managed to shoot this target first. The player will have to use her body to move her paddle near the pow and by using another gesture (e.g. jump up) "grab" the pow and acquire the extra functionality that it represents (e.g., enlarge her paddle). The targets will be common for both players, which means that the player who is more spot-on will get more pows than her opponent.
Some pows will provide the player with extra options which will have to use other body gestures to be taken advantage of. For example, the paddle would be temporarily armed with a freezer gun; the player will have to use a special gesture to activate the gun and aim at the opponent's paddle on screen. If she manages to hit him, his paddle will freeze for a few seconds and eventually gain advantage at this point of the game. Just to make things more complicated (and amusing) the player could unfreeze his paddle by performing a strange and funny combinaiton of body gestures!
Similar implementations
One of the suggestions was to project the image with the action on the
floor between the two players. However, this limits the available
distance between the two players, who would have to be close enough
(otherwise the projector will have to be placed too high to achieve a
20-25ft pong field). Consequently, small body moves could suffice for
controlling the paddles (an example implementation is included below), a fact that contradicts
with our initial design idea to have the players literally run up and
down to keep the virtual ball in the field. Additionally, there are no other movements whatsoever that are demanded from the player to control the paddle and affect gameplay (e.g., strech her hands to enlarge the paddle). Another similar small-scale implementation in which players use some kind of rolling footstool to shift left-right, was developed as a digital art installation in New York. Once more, it has the fundamental differences that we mentioned before.
A probably more closely related implementation is the one used during a Japanese game, where there are two players on each side and are making the kind of "blatant" body gestures that we have in mind for our design idea. They have solved the big projection problem using a large floor-mounted LED screen, instead of a top-down projected image.
These implementations are probably an incentive to look for more innocative design ideas, which maybe related, or not, with our physical polng idea. More on this on the next post...
No comments:
Post a Comment