PET, which is a Dutch abbreviation that means "Stage and Event Technology", requested a collaboration between the Software Development course and their Course. I was the Developer that joined this project.
Pong is a very old arcade game where you have 2 bats and a ball. The bats are opposite of each other and the ball bounces around in a level field. The players use the bats to prevent the ball from passing into their goal, while trying to score on the other side.
The problem we wanted to solve with this project was true vizualisation and immersion. A lot of games try to enhance immersion by pulling the player into the game. We, however, decided to go the other way around: Create the game in the real world.
We used Unreal Engine to handle the mathematical calculations for the Pong game itself, as well as the calculations for the rotation of the large spotlight.
We used a readily available DMX plugin to enable communication between all devices: The laptop running Unreal Engine, a light control table that powered the lights, a sound mixer table that powered the audio, two midi devices for the player inputs, as well as two laptops that were used to power the projector screens.
I was invited to the project a mere 3 weeks before the MA exposition day, which was the deadline. This resulted in fast communication and itteration between me and the other members of the team.
The technical aspects were handled by me and Pascal. Pascal is a 3rd year PET student studying to become Light Engineer and he was in charge of the vfx, while I worked on the game mechanics within Unreal Engine. We also had a lot of help from Tom and Bernd, two first year PET students that helped constructing the hardware setup.
During the expo day, a lot of teachers from other courses visited our expo and expressed their desires to increase the amount of collaboration between the different courses of MA, and they were of the opinion that this project served as a successful pilot, proving that these projects should happen more in the future.
This project got shelved after completion