Physical Pong game

Windell and Lenore of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories made this real-life Tabletop Pong game.

Two players each have a single knob that controls the position of a paddle along a short track. Using the paddles, they bounce the ball back and forth and try not to miss the ball, lest the other player score a point. The paddle surfaces are curved, so that the ball reflects in different directions depending on the position of impact. The paddles are powered, so that the ball keeps a fairly constant velocity between the two sides, and the speed gradually increases as the game is played. The playfield is level and has a dotted line down the middle, and the scores are displayed on either side of that line. There are top and bottom walls of the playfield that the ball can bounce off of. Sounds possible, right? So we built it.

A playable game of Tabletop Pong

• [Anonymous]

  Wow! People have a lot of odd criticisms. Must be a lot of engineers reading this!

  Where would one get a mildly parabolic surface to play with? Introducing that kind of curvature into this greatly complicates the mechanics. And “just” modify an air hockey table? For that you need to actually HAVE an air hockey table. Do you have an air hockey table?

  • [SamSam]

    @ Anon #10:

    (I’m guessing maybe you’re one of the creators?)

    A parabolic surface would actually be very easy to implement. Simply use a reasonably thin piece of pexiglass, say 1-2 mm thick, which can be slightly bent. Stick a very thin dowel on the center line. Place pexiglass on top of dowel. Build frame around pexiglass such that the ends (where the players are) are trapped under the frame.

    Voila, a gently curved parabolic surface. No other changes or engineering required.

    If you are the creator, nice work! It’s really cool! But I’m guessing that all engineers recognize when they build something that it might be a version 1, or even 0.9, and that they can see the existing bugs (e.g. ball keeps stopping) and try to improve on them in the next version.

• [Anonymous]

  i’ll liked this better when it was called air hockey.

• [oskay]

  @SamSam:
  No, I’m one of the creators. We don’t reply anonymously to criticism, and we’re not that touchy. :)

  It should be pretty clear from the sound in the video that we’re just trying this out for the first time. The whole project was designed and built in one week, and we got it to mostly playable in that time– we’re pretty proud of that, bugs and all.

  There are a couple of issues. One is that we hadn’t yet leveled the table. Another is that we probably should turn up the solenoids a bit more (they can go quite a bit higher). Another– unavoidable –is that any physical paddle can hit the ball to a range of sharp angles that PONG never will, and will eventually lead to a stall.

  Tilting the playfield by a few mm down on both sides– approximating a parabolic curve– would be easy, and not noticeable in regular play, UNTIL you one of those bad angles and the ball rolls backwards off the table. I don’t know if this is a good tradeoff or not. There are other tricks that we could do as well– for example tilting the playfield if the ball were moving too slowly in the correct direction.

  @#3:
  An air hockey table doesn’t look right, and it would have the same stalling problems that pinball does on a level surface. Air hockey *is* a good idea, but if we were going to do this, we would instead build it from scratch as a small, proper looking, PONG-looking air table.

  @blearghhh:
  Pongmechanik was an amazing, if very different, project. We discuss it in our article which Mark linked to– click through if you want to read about why we made this even though that’s already out there.

• [bkofford]

  I think a mild parabolic curve would work a little better. It would keep the ball from stopping in the middle of the field without causing the ball to jump from a sudden change in pitch. It would also be easier to implement than a mechanically tilting table, provided you can find or manufacture the right piece of material.

• [Zac]

  Very silly. Clearly not quite fully functional yet though.

• [imag]

  Would it be that hard to put the camera on a tripod or solid surface? Is this game really so out of control that the filmmaker needed to go handheld? Panning across a two foot board is ridiculous…

  Like the game though…

• [EvilSpirit]

  You could solve that problem of the ball stalling out by having the surface tilt slightly away from the last paddle to hit the ball.

  • [Anonymous]

    Or perhaps slightly pitch the “playing field” so that the center line is the highest point.

• [Anonymous]

  And why don’t you just modify airhockey table?

• [Anonymous]

  Needs more steampunk.

• [SamSam]

  Or tilt out slightly from the center line, like a very gentle pyramid. That way any ball that crosses the center line would always make it to the other side (and any ball too slow to even do that would simply return to the player, and eliminate the need to push the ball.

• [blearghhh]

  Reminds me of the mechanical pong machine. Different takes on the same concept.

  I love that the simplest of games provides this kind of creativity in the making. Sort of like the porting of Quake as a proving ground for new platforms.

  http://cyberniklas.de/pongmechanik/indexen.html