A Giant Version of Pong Played With Feet Should Be the Next Olympic Sport.
Moment Factory has created GRiD, a Pong variant that uses a LiDAR sensor (the same tech as in self-driving cars) to create an enormous, 40-by-60 foot playing field where the paddle only moves when you and a partner shuffle your feet together. You could get quite the workout if the teams are evenly matched, and that’s before the game adds wrinkles like surprise acceleration or an extra ball.
The aim was to bring back the social dimension of games you might remember from the glory days of arcades, when you’d play with strangers that exist as more than an online nickname. GRiD takes it a step further by placing the game in the real world.
Moment Factory describes this as the first “prototype” in a series of arcade-related projects. You probably won’t see it made widely available, at least not until there’s some refinement. All the same, this illustrates just how public gaming experiences can work without requiring VR or other technologies that take you out of the real world.
