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!