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Out of the screens and into the street!

2010 | Design Academy Eindhoven for LumaLive (Philips)

A semi virtual pong-like game is set up on a square piece of fabric. it can be folded or unfolded to change the field size, it can be hanged on a wall or placed on the floor. It can adapt to different topographies and surfaces. it can be attached to other Pong fabrics to increase the field size and play with its geometries. objects placed upon it participate in the game.

When we look at how sports have been treated on the virtual sphere, the classic game Pong immediately comes to mind. Pong was the first commercial and successful video game, and it did so by abstracting the idea of most ball sports to the basic rule – don’t let the ball get pass you. Yet, Pong was also the starting point of our dependency on screens for fun, which today we can barely avoid. While video games evolved in their sense of realism, with augmented reality and consoles like Wii and Kinect, we are still facing that screen barrier. But by mixing the basic Pong rule with the qualities of textile, we ,might still break this barrier.

If Pong got us into the screens, Pong will get us out.

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