Projection Mapped Ping Pong

Asahi Beer

Double Take Projections created an interactive state of the art projection-mapped ping pong table – featuring arcade buttons for players to keep score and change visuals. Badaboom commissioned the project for Asahi Beers’ recent campaign of experiential bar takeovers and brand launch events. The table was a key feature of the UK wide tour and was rolled out to over 80 bars and nightclubs over a six-month period.

To avoid the need for a video technician to be on-site every night, it was imperative to create a system which was as ‘plugin and play’ as possible. With limited training, Badaboom staff successfully set up and ran the installation by themselves – with Double Take Projections on call if necessary. Other than ensuring that brand colours, logos and typefaces were used where possible, we were given free creative control over the design to produce interactive content that was engaging and exciting.

Several constraints informed the design process for this build – a limited budget, a need for portability, adapting to a variety of venue sizes and having no video technician on site. We were forced to be creative in our approach, building a system that was simple to use. Although unconventional in this setting, we opted to use ‘Resolume Arena 6’ to drive the installation. Double Take Projections were keen to utilise the audio-reactive capability of the software and the option to trigger the cue specific clips meant that we could ‘hack’ the software to resemble some basic game mechanics. The bulk of the content was created in After Effects while the generative components were created directly inside Resolume.

A contact microphone was positioned underneath either side of the table and fed into a USB audio interface. The team were able to isolate the frequency of noise that the ball made when coming into contact with the table and used that data to drive effective parameters. When the ball bounced off the table, the visuals reacted and morphed.

To add to the overall user experience, five arcade buttons were fabricated onto the edges of the table. These were hard-wired to an Arduino micro-computer which sent a MIDI signal to the laptop allowing players to keep score and change scenes.