Hasta La Gadget!

As far as competitive videogames go, you can’t get any simpler than Pong. But times have changed, and so have our tastes and need for mayhem. We can’t just have birds, they need to be angry birds. So if Pong is to be played by today’s gamers – bored adults and foul-mouthed adolescents alike – it can’t just have two paddles and a ball. There needs to be chaos.

Invented by Stacy Dudley and Brad Slattery, the RetroBall is a bat-and-ball game system – let’s just call a Pong a Pong and call it Pong. It has a 32×32 pixel LED screen, an acrylic enclosure and 1-bit sound effects. It’s clearly more powerful than the Wii U. The RetroBall has four paddle controllers so you can engage in four-player Pong deathmatches, and you can even increase the number of balls onscreen to five. It’s actually kind of reminiscent of Atari’s arcade classic Warlords.

But don’t let the cutting edge graphics and complicated gameplay fool you: you can’t just button mash your way to victory here like in your other modern games, primarily because there’s no button to mash, but also because skilled RetroBall players – probably named Stacy and Brad – are aware that you can change the spin and speed of a ball depending on how you hit it.

Pledge at least $149 (USD) on Kickstarter to reserve a RetroBall game system. Launch titles include 2-player Pong with 1 ball, 3-player Pong with 1 ball, 4-player Pong with 1 ball, 2-player Pong with 2 balls…

[via Ubergizmo]

Some walk lights have buttons you can press to let the system know that there are pedestrians waiting to cross, while some others have a Pong game unit instead.

Too bad you can only find the latter in Germany.

Apparently someone thought that pedestrians needed some entertainment while they wait for the lights to turn red. That entertainment came in the form of Street Pong. These basically allow pedestrians on opposite sides of the street to play pong while the cars go zooming past.

The cool thing is that there’s actually a timer which counts down just how much playing time you have left before it’s time to cross the street.

Awesome stuff. Now if we can only get these everywhere.

[via Geekologie]

I once bruised my thumbs after a night-long marathon playing Tekken 3 with my college buddies. It was torture to go back to school the next day and hurdle through a pop quiz that served up mostly essay-type questions.

Bruised fingers are probably nothing new to you if you’re a true blue gamer. But if you’re itching to play something – anything! – while your digits are out of commission, then how about a game of Pong which you can play with your eyes? Sounds unreal, but it’s not.

Dr. Aldo Faisal and his team from the Department of Computing at UK’s Imperial College took some glasses, tweaked them and rigged them with circuitry to track eye movements in 3D. And voila: wearers can now play Pong simply by donning the glasses, and looking where they want the paddle to move.

The glasses weren’t made specifically for playing retro arcade games, though, as the researchers came up with them to help people with mobility or motor control issues like MS or Parkinson’s to issue commands with their eyes. And as the video shows, it’s definitely promising.

[via Gizmodo Australia via Dvice]

There’s a lot of research to help the spinal cord or stroke-injured become more self-sufficient, but it often takes some exotic paraphernalia. To buck that trend, scientists from Imperial College London showed that subjects could perform relatively hard tasks like writing messages and playing Pong using eye movement — with a mere $35-worth of parts. They even showed how well the system worked, with subjects scoring within 20 percent of an able-bodied person after a scant 10 minutes of practice. The tracker works with two video console cameras and a pair of eyeglasses that, after calibration, can precisely track the pupils — allowing them to control a cursor or move a paddle. The researchers also figured out how to “click” the eye-mouse by winking, and can even use more precise adjustments to calculate gaze depth — meaning subjects will be able to perform more complex tasks in the future, like guide a motorized wheelchair. While by no means the first eye-tracking system we’ve seen, it’s by far the most economical. Check the video after the break to see how it works.

Continue reading Researchers use off-the-shelf parts to let you write emails with your eyes (video)

Filed under: Science

Researchers use off-the-shelf parts to let you write emails with your eyes (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 13 Jul 2012 08:52:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Forty years. That’s a long time in the tech industry and Atari knows it. Today it celebrates four decades in the game, and quite the tale it is. Highs, lows and everything in between, Atari has been there. As one of the most influential brands both in gaming and technology, it only seems right to take a look over the company’s history and chart some of the more significant twists in its less than straightforward journey. After the break we speak to the man that started it all and the one currently at the helm, as well as some of the many people whose lives were irreversibly changed by its influence. Happy birthday to you, Atari!

Continue reading Atari: celebrating 40 years on the dots

Atari: celebrating 40 years on the dots originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 27 Jun 2012 17:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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