About

We set out to create a ping pong simulator game that allows a player to physically mime Pong Pong paddle motions to interact with the game. We wanted to challenge ourselves in doing accurate ping pong physical simulation and monocular computer vision.

Structure

This project uses an Model View Controller (MVC) framework for standard code organization. Each class is tied together through a main script that imports and runs the game in loop. The main features of each class are as follows

• Main: runs the game and handles game over splash screen
• Model: stores all game data and simulates ping pong physics and paddle interaction
• Controller: uses mediapipe to get hand motions and pynput keyboard for angle and serve inputs
• View: visualizes the table, ball and paddle in a pygame view

Setup

Clone the Github repository

Clone the github repository to your local machine using your desired method. Navigate to the folder in terminal.

git clone <PROJECT KEY OR HTTP>

If you don’t know how or require further resources on cloning Github repositories, use this resources To install MediaPipe and all the other dependencies, open the project folder and run:

Create a conda env (highly recommended)

To isolate dependencies and python versions, create a conda environment that uses python 3.10.

Use the following command to create

conda create -n <NAME_OF_ENV> python==3.10

Use the following command to activate

conda activate <NAME_OF_ENV>

Note that NAME_OF_ENV must be identical to the previous name you input however it doesn’t matter which folder you are in when you activate.

Install requirements

The final setup step is installing the requirements. Make sure you are in the root folder of the repository before running the following command.

pip install -r requirements.txt

Playing the game

Running

1. Navigate to the repository root folder.
2. Make sure all setup instructions are followed and the conda env is activated.
3. Run the following command

python3 main.py

Please note that the program requires a fast single thread CPU. If the code runs but is very slow it is a hardware limitation.

Game rules

Welcome to AIR-PONG, the best way of playing 1v1 Ping Pong on the go. You may look a bit silly while playing, but trust me - it really changes your ping pong game.

Before we begin, let’s lay some ground truths.

• Each player must control with a different hand
  • Players using their right hand to play use WAD to control serve and rotation
  • Players using their left hand to play use arros UP, LEFT and RIGHT to control serve and rotation
• Games are played until 11 points, win by 2, serve switches every 2
• Only one player can rotate their paddle at a time

Now you can start playing! Good luck!

Authors

Julian Shah

A robotics engineer and programmer from Seattle WA (really likes coffee)

Ansel Harris Crowne

An electrical and sustainability engineer from Portland, OR (coffee snob)

Lukas Littlejohn

An ECE from West Springfield, MA (also really likes coffee)

Attribution

• This project runs using Google’s open source project MediaPipe.
• This project makes heavy use of pygame for visuals
• This project makes heavy use of pynput for keyboard inputs
• This project makes heavy use of vpython for physics and math