Review by Malachy Tallack on Northings

"THE WORDS ‘interactive art’ can provoke an involuntary shudder among some gallery goers, including this one..."  

read the review here
 

The Art of Ping Pong

The Art of Ping Pong artwork from a game just played during the exhibition at Bonhoga Gallery.

The Art of Ping Pong

The Art of Ping Pong artwork from a game just played during the exhibition at Bonhoga Gallery.

The Art of Ping Pong

The Art of Ping Pong artwork from a game just played during the exhibition at Bonhoga Gallery.

The Art of Ping Pong

The Art of Ping Pong artwork from a game just played during the exhibition at Bonhoga Gallery.

The Art of Ping Pong

The Art of Ping Pong artwork from a game just played during the exhibition at Bonhoga Gallery.

The Art of Ping Pong

The Art of Ping Pong artwork from a game just played during the exhibition at Bonhoga Gallery.

The Art of Ping Pong

The Art of Ping Pong artwork from a game just played during the exhibition at Bonhoga Gallery.

The Art of Ping Pong

The Art of Ping Pong artwork from a game just played during the exhibition at Bonhoga Gallery.

The Art of Ping Pong

The Art of Ping Pong artwork from a game just played during the exhibition at Bonhoga Gallery.

The Art of Ping Pong

The Art of Ping Pong artwork from a game just played during the exhibition at Bonhoga Gallery.

The Art of Ping Pong

The Art of Ping Pong artwork from a game just played during the exhibition at Bonhoga Gallery.

The Art of Ping Pong

The Art of Ping Pong artwork from a game just played during the exhibition at Bonhoga Gallery.

The Art of Ping Pong

The Art of Ping Pong artwork from a game just played during the exhibition at Bonhoga Gallery.

The Art of Ping Pong

The Art of Ping Pong artwork from a game just played during the exhibition at Bonhoga Gallery.

The Art of Ping Pong

The Art of Ping Pong artwork from a game just played during the exhibition at Bonhoga Gallery.

Ping Pong takeover at Bonhoga Gallery!

Lots more Ping Pong madness at Bonhoga Gallery today as the exhibition continues. Just 3 days left to come and have a go at making some Ping Pong generated artwork!

See the full gallery on Posterous

The Art of Ping Pong - Press Release

The Art of Ping Pong is coming to Bonhoga for five days next week, combining sport, technology and creativity in a blend of colour and style. Jono Sandilands is taking over the gallery for what has become known as Renegade Week. This is the first year that the programming and curation team at Shetland Arts has scheduled in this week to the gallery programme, as a platform for some unusual and innovative projects.

Jono Sandilands is a designer and visual artist, whose work is exploring new technologies to enable a participatory experience for the viewer. The project started life back in 2009 in response to a brief set by YCN Annual Student Design Awards. At this time it was simply to record where the ball makes contact with the table during a game of table tennis, to allow player interactivity to create original pieces of artwork. The conceptual outcome was commended and won the YCN national student award in 2009.

In 2010, supported by a Visual Artist Award from Shetland Arts in partnership with Creative Scotland and Shetland Islands Council Jono was able to develop the concept into a reality, exploring many different methods of tracking and also expanding his skills in programming software and hardware along the way.

Jono said, “everyone enjoys a game of table tennis, or ping pong. Whether it’s a spot of fun or a sporting occasion; most people when asked if they would like to play will reply positively. After they have played they will say that playing was fun and yet most people never play regularly. What the Art of Ping Pong strives to do is to encourage people to play more table tennis.”

 Jane Matthews of Shetland Arts said, “this is a brilliant participatory artwork that will offer fun for all ages. In a year when sport has been on everyone’s radar I am delighted that we can add some creativity into the mix with Jono’s colourful project”.

The interactive table consists of a projector and a hacked Xbox Kinect which sits above a normal table tennis table. The ball movements are tracked on the table and sent back to a piece of software which tells the projector to display one of many different possible styles of artwork onto the correct location of the table. After a game has been played the ping pong- generated artwork will be automatically printed out and can be hung up on the gallery walls, to be displayed while further gaming commences.

Shetland Arts presents The Art of Ping Pong at its first public exhibition at Bonhoga Gallery from Wednesday 7 - Sunday 11 November. The public opening is on Tuesday 6th November from 5.30-7.30pm and will include live demos by Shetland Table Tennis Association and music by 45/33 Promotions DJs. Everyone is very welcome.

Links:

www.shetlandarts.org
www.theartofpingpong.blogspot.co.uk

www.facebook.com/TheArtOfPingPong
www.twitter.com/ArtofPingPong

www.flickr.com/photos/theartofpingpong

Exhibition Invite

Public Opening: Tuesday 6 November 5.30pm - 7.30pm. With Live demos by Shetland Table Tennis Association and music by 45/33 Promotions DJs. Please share this and come along, all welcome!



This time next week The Art of Ping Pong will be taking over Bonhoga Gallery in preparation for the opening night on Tuesday 6 November from 5.30 - 7.30pm. Lots of little things still to do, but great to have some test games over the weekend, including this one with Jo Jack.

The Art of Ping Pong

The Art of Ping Pong test game uploaded directly from the table

Reasearch: A printer with felt tips instead of ink: Penjet

Jaan Evartm, Julian Hagen and Daniël Maarleveld: PenJet

http://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/penjet-1
Further reading:
www.jaanevart.com/penjet

Research: Digital RGB LED Strip

I'm planning some things for the exhibition with LEDs and found this tutorial, may be too late for what I'm planning but good to know for future!

http://learn.adafruit.com/digital-led-strip

The Art of Ping Pong photos

Some promo shots of The Art of Ping Pong showing just one example of artwork which can be created during game play:
 

The Art of Ping Pong

The Art of Ping Pong test game uploaded directly from the table

The Art of Ping Pong Exhibition

The Art of Ping Pong will be exhibited at Bonhoga Gallery, Shetland from Wednesday 7 to Sunday 11 November 2012.
Please come along to the opening night on Tuesday 6 Novemver from 5.30pm-7.30pm
There will be live demos by Shetland Table Tennis Association, music by 45/33 Promotions DJs along with refreshments!

Art, Ping Pong, Music and Wine what more could you want!?

Stay tuned for major progress updates and extras over the next few weeks.

Equipment: Ping Pong Table Acquired

I have been on the look out for a Table Tennis Table for some time, after a few phone calls and help from Shetland Table Tennis Association I managed to find a second hand table. My Dad took his trailer to help me pick it up yesterday. There was a bit of wind and a 20 mile journey which took over an hour because we had to drive so slowly. But we finally made it, and the table is in his new home ready for some serious work!

The other thought, which I had totally over looked, how do we get this into the gallery? Mmmmmmhhhh?

Research: Butchers hook

"Butcher's Hook set up a digital display using an old Nintendo Wii remote, custom made Infa-Red yellow pencils, a wireless doorbell, a printer and a few extra ingredients." (From Creative Review)

Research: NOISY JELLY

This looks great fun.

First proper tracking with the Kinect

Tracking and recording where the ball hits the table. Well my coffee table. I need to get a proper table tennis table.

This is a screengrab using Processing & Xbox Kinect.

It's running smoother than previous prototypes (see here which was colour tracking the ball with a normal camera) The depth detection is a huge bonus, now it's not just tracking a moving object and drawing, but tracking a moving object at a certain depth and only drawing when it's there.

Object detection will be something to look at. It would be good for it only to track the ball (and not my hand). Although, it would be interesting to add hand gestures, eg. clear the table and start a clean canvas with a specific hand/arm motion across the table.

 This second image was saved directly from Processing to an images folder during gameplay, by pressing a button on the keyboard. This folder would be set up to print the image automatically. There would probably need to be a timed delay. (And also it probably should be set to save as a white background to save ink)

Using the Kinect is having it's advantages, but there will be a problem when it comes to tracking faster games as the camera will not have a high enough frame rate to pick up the ball. More testing will be done!

Note to self: Print PDF Files Automatically

Just putting this here for myself so I remember to look:
http://www.coolutils.com/Print-PDF-automatically
http://superuser.com/questions/140806/how-to-automatically-print-the-contents-of-a-folder-in-os-x 

Sorted this with an Automater Folder Action.

First tracking with the Kinect

Now this may not look like much, but it is picture of tracking the ping pong ball through the Kinect in Processing.

The ball (dark red area) is sitting on a table and has drawn a spot/target where it made contact with the table.

For me this is quite a big (huge) step in the concept!

The target was drawn with the Brushes app, and this is something which I'm going to explore further, to allow players to create their own targets for use on the table.

Research: Quadrocopter ball juggling

This has to be the coolest thing ever?

The Art of Ping Pong meets Xbox Kinect hardware

It's been a bit quiet on the Ping Pong front for a while now, and its time to get going again!

The Art of Ping Pong will be on display at Bonhoga Gallery in Shetland from Wednesday 7 - Sunday 11 November (Public opening: Tuesday 6 November 5.30pm - 7.30pm)

You will see since I've started this blog there has been alot of research into the hardware and other examples of similar projects. I have finally made a decision on the hardware to use after a bit of a breakthrough in my research. I will be using the Xbox Kinect hardware which includes an RGB camera and 3D depth sensors, which is perfect for what I need to track where the ball hits the table.

For the exhibition in November, I have decided due to my time restraints of working full time alongside this project, there will be some scaling back on how complicated the application will be. In the concept I outlined how scores could be kept and it could track any fouls etc, basically it would know the rules of Table Tennis, but this part will be stripped out (for the timebeing anyway). My aim is to be able to get it to a place where gameplay creates original pieces of art, which are printed then pinned up around the gallery.

So I have started playing with the Kinect, and have got it speaking to my computer. Very exciting!

Kinect in openFrameworks: http://openkinect.org/

So far I have been doing my prototypes in Processing so this may be of use too:
Kinect in Processing: http://www.shiffman.net/p5/kinect/

And as always, still a long way to go, and still ideas to play with.
More soon!

Research: Tracking on arbitrary planes with Kinect