VIDEO: GIANT-SIZED PING-PONG TURNS HUMANS INTO PADDLES

Pong is one of the earliest arcade video games and, after a year of development, design firm, Moment Factory, has successfully released GRiD; a large-scale, real-life version of Pong.

The game uses LiDAR to track player movements, letting teams of two act as paddles on a giant projected game board. The team was inspired by the LiDAR technology that is used to track objects around self-driving cars. They spent a year experimenting with the sensors and wrote custom software to allow it to accurately track moving people.

The aim of the game was to bring the social dimension of games you might remember from the glory days of arcades when you'd play with strangers that exist as more than an online nickname. The gameplay looks impressively dynamic with very little latency between a person's movements and the corresponding paddle. Moment Factory suggest that while the technology to create this kind of game experience is still a little expensive, it is planning on building an entire series of arcade-themed prototypes following on from this.

Such an approach has the potential to turn usually sedentary video games into heart-rate-raising workouts. Take a look at GRiD in action in the video below. What fun!

GRiD : Transforming public spaces with collaborative play from Moment Factory on Vimeo.