Playing Pong with your shadow

The technical stuff from the Living Room of Map_of_You was exhibited at the afterparty of the it-natten event at ITU. Instead of moving around furniture-icons, you could play Pong with your shadow. I purchased a Logitech Quickcam Pro 9000 for the event, a superb piece of kit. So superb, in fact, that it proved impossible to run the installation with a white background because the camera would see the all-white screen and try to colour-correct out something. I ended up running the thing with the alpha-channel (normally used for tuning) displayed in all it’s pixelated CGA-glory. It was supposed to be a geeky/techy anyway, so that was OK. An automatic AI-mode, a scoring mechanism and sound would have been nice.

People genuinely seemed to have fun though, and I got a chance to explain how the setup works to a few of the high school kids there, hopefully getting them interested in a career in IT. Pictures below, courtesy of Mette Lundberg.