Niklas Roy

Niklas Roy

Work from PING!.

“In the decade where videogames were born, everything virtual looked like rectangular blocks. From today’s perspective, the representation of a tennis court in the earliest videogames is hard to distinguish from a soccer or a basketball field.
‘PING! – Augmented Pixel’ is a seventies style videogame, that adds a layer of digital information and oldschool aesthetics to a video signal: A classic rectangular video game ball moves across a video image. Whenever the ball hits something dark, it bounces off. The game itself has no rules and no goal. Like GTA, it provides a free environment in which anything is possible. And like Sony’s Eyetoy, it uses a video camera as game controller.

What I found interesting when I developed this game, is, that it could have been made already in the seventies. The technology that I used for it is (in a way) similar to what Atari used for the first Pong. It becomes even more awkward, if you think that the electronic components for capturing and evaluating a video signal are cheaper than the rotary game controllers that Atari used. But still, from an economic point of view it makes sense that Eyetoys weren’t the ultimate controllers of thirty-something years ago, as a video camera was probably very hard to afford back in the days.” – Niklas Roy

via Today and Tomorrow.

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