This interactive ping pong table tracks where players hit the ball

Thomas Mayer, a carpenter and designer based in Germany, has created a ping pong table concept that's more exciting than the entirety of Balls of Fury. As Designboom notes, Mayer's project uses two PlayStation eye cameras and an HD projector to track the ball and collect data, which can then be used to map a player's stats onto the table.

When Mayer decided to build the ping pong table (which was his thesis project at the University of Design Schwäbisch Gmünd), his goal was to create data visualization in real time for players. As you can see in the video, a dashboard for each individual player is projected onto the table. The dashboard keeps track of a player's wins and loses, as well as technical stats like speed, saves, and stability. Users can track their past moves and make gameplay decisions based on the projections.

"It was challenging to design a functional interface which is projectable on a ping pong table taking in consideration the players’ ergonomics," Mayer writes on his website. "Project resolution, layout of the interface and arrangement of buttons were the biggest problems that I had to test in many prototypes."

• ViaDesignboom
• SourceThomas Mayer