Cinematrix "Pong"
Loren Carpenter, Rachel Carpenter, and others, 1967

Links
http://www.cinematrix.com
founders

Can an arena full of people act as a "group mind" and control imagery on a video screen in real time? Cinematrix is a unique system which allows every audience member real time control through the use of a hand held "paddle" which they can flip from one side to the other. Each side has special retro-reflective material which reflects light directly back to its source (same material as on running shoes to reflect car headlights back to the driver). The Cinematrix paddles have green retroreflective material on one side and red on the other, and audience members can flip them back and forth quickly in real time. In front of the arena, above the projection screen, is a camera and light source mounted carefully together on-axis via a half-silvered mirror. The camera sees each red/green reflection and a computer determines the "vote."

Such a system was first demonstrated at Siggraph '91 in Las Vegas during the Electronic Theater show, in an arena with several thousand people in the audience. The paddles were all hand-made using (free) wooden paint stirrers with strips of hte material stapled on each side. One of the demos was the game of "Pong," with the left half of the audience against the right half.

What is interesting to me is how a relatively inexpensive system can transform a common video game like Pong into a unique and intense group experience, almost transcendentally so.

Submitted by
Michael Naimark

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