A student in Germany has developed an interactive ping pong table that makes use of augmented reality technology to track the movement of the ball during a match in order to help players improve their game.
Known as the Table Tennis Trainer, the device was created by Thomas Mayer from the University of Design Schwäbisch Gmünd as part of his bachelor's thesis.
Mayer has fitted his smart ping pong table with a projected mapped interface specially designed to monitor how a ball moves across its surface in real time.
The program then uses the collected data to produce visualizations to help trainers and players plan their next move during a match. These include where they should land the ball on their next serve, the performance of their shots and other crucial information.
To create the Table Tennis Trainer, Mayer installed a full high-definition projector and a pair of PlayStation CL-eye cameras to a regular ping pong table in order to track a ball during game play as well as process the collected data.
After gathering enough data, Mayer then developed several display panels that can project game play statistics directly onto the smart ping pong table, which trainers and players can use for match analytics in real time.
Users can take advantage of the projection interface to map obstacles onto the ping pong table's surface to allow them to experiment with other game rules. This is quite helpful to players who wish to jazz up their game play to make it more interesting and enjoyable especially if regular table tennis isn't exciting enough anymore.
The Table Tennis Trainer is also capable of storing player profiles to allow users to track and measure their progress continuously.
So far, Mayer's interactive ping pong table is still only a prototype, and there is no indication of whether the design student will offer his creation to the public.
