[ISEA2008] Paper: Eelco Wagenaar & Arjan Scherpenisse – PING, an alternate reality of control

Abstract
We are 2 students from the DOGtime/Gerrit Rietveld Academy Amsterdam and we are studying Unstable Media/Interactive Design. My collegue is Arjan Scherpenisse, who has a background in ICT/programming and I am Eelco Wagenaar, and I have a background in mechanical engineering/industrial design. We have build an installation called ‘PING’ which we would like to enter for your ‘Ludic Interfaces’ program.

A little explaination about our work.                                                                                                            We have built an installation which makes it possible to play physically pingpong with a person on a different location than where you are. We are making a promo film for our installation. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6h3klf1Hn4. The featured film is just the first cut, but I think it makes everything clear enough.

We already showed the installation on 2 events and we are now developing the installation to be technical (almost) perfect. We featured in a show in Mediamatic, Amsterdam (The Netherlands) and we also featured on PICNIC 2007, which was a fairly big cross-media event, also in Amsterdam (the Netherlands).

The steps we want to take in our development is to make the installation more fail safe. Meaning we are still working on the sensoring of the bats. And also the next steps we want to take is to make the installation work using a wideband internet connection (we now still running it through some wires..), which means that the installation could work over big distances using the internet.

  • Eelco Wagenaar Arjan Scherpenisse, The Netherlands

Full text (PDF) p. 451-452