Skip to main content

Leap Motion’s AR table tennis is a long way from your parents’ Pong

Leap Motion Table Tennis in Augmented Reality

Leap Motion has a brand-new game for early testers of its Project Northstar augmented reality headset to play around with: Table tennis. The game leverages not only the headset itself but a new paddle controller as well, and comes with its own A.I. opponent so all you really need is a table. In the demonstration we see the headset wearer bouncing a virtual ball between paddles and having a full game with a floating digital paddle on the opposite end of the table. Better yet, they never have to go and pick up the ball when it falls off the table.

Recommended Videos

Augmented reality might not have received quite the same push as virtual reality just yet — some think we’re still a few years away from its mainstream adoption — but there are plenty of companies working away at it. Microsoft’s HoloLens is one prominent example, but Leap Motion’s Project Northstar turned heads earlier this year for its expansive headset design and development still continues apace.

As much as the table tennis demonstration looks like a fun way to spend some time in augmented reality, Leap Motion software engineer Johnathon Selstad said that he sees this as more of an example of mixed reality skills training. He sees augmented reality’s greatest potential in helping people to learn things in a partly digital space. Skills they can then apply to the real world. In the case of table tennis, simply practicing a game with real-world motions with an A.I. opponent could help to improve your game without needing to play with people in the real world.

Practice Makes Perfect

“In VR, we can shape the experience to optimize learning a task or behavior,” Selstad explained. “AR elevates this potential with familiar real-world environments, allowing us to contextualize learned skills. By overlaying virtual indicators and heuristics onto the user’s view, we can even help them develop a deeper intuition of the system.”

In the context of a table tennis game, physics projections of where the ball will go can be shown to the player to help them learn to intuitively understand how it will behave. While such a lesson may not translate 100 percent to the real world, it’s certainly more useful than playing a similar game with a controller or with no real-world environment around you.

That’s especially true when it comes to A.I. opponents. As we saw with humans vs. A.I. matchups in games like Go, when near-perfect A.I. play against top-tier human players, the humans typically lose but improve themselves by learning from their artificial opponents. AR has the potential to make such gameplay more applicable to the real world.

Jon Martindale
Jon Martindale is a freelance evergreen writer and occasional section coordinator, covering how to guides, best-of lists, and…
The robot takeover comes another step closer — at Amazon
An Amazon robot working inside one of the company's warehouses.

Amazon is close to having more robots operating inside its warehouses than humans after the e-commerce giant announced this week that it now has more than a million robots working at its facilities around the world.

Over the years, Amazon has spent billions of dollars on the development and deployment of warehouse-based robots, which handle an array of tasks once performed by human workers.

Read more
This Lenovo ThinkPad laptop is over $1,400 off — hurry while stocks last!
The Lenovo ThinkPad T14 Gen 5 Intel laptop on a white background.

Now's an excellent time to take advantage of laptop deals from Lenovo, which has slashed the prices of a wide range of devices for its Black Friday in July sale. Lenovo's ThinkPad laptops are up to 45% off, and here's one of the most interesting offers available with such a discount — the Lenovo ThinkPad T14 Gen 5 at $1,440 off its estimated value of $3,199, so you'll only have to pay $1,759. That's an excellent price for this fantastic productivity tool, but you're going to have to push forward with your purchase as soon as possible because stocks may run out at any moment.

BUY NOW

Read more
Early Prime Day deal: Samsung’s 27-inch Odyssey G3 at its annual low price
Samsung Odyssey G3 gaming monitor on desk with keyboard and headset.

If you're ready to upgrade your monitor, this Samsung deal over at Amazon just might be your best bet. The 27-inch version of Samsung's Odyssey G3 is $130 right now, a full $100 off its regular $230 price and its lowest price of the year. It's a part of early Prime Day deals and a good sampling of what we can expect for the shopping holiday, which officially lands on July 8th. Tap the button below to see it for yourself or keep reading to see why we like this deal and why this should be your next monitor.

Buy Now

Read more