While Silicon Valley continues to obsess over the next revolution in gaming, a group of friends in Uruguay have built an impressive piece of machinery that brings gaming tech to the old-fashioned world of actual things that exist in three-dimensional space. Introducing the mechanical version of Pong, a cross between the classic Atari game and an air-hockey table, but with a lot more going on under the hood.
The guys behind this brilliant device call themselves the Pong Project, and the painstaking two-year process depicted in the above video was a labor of love that they completed in their spare time. None of the guys involved in building this thing were trained in any of the disciplines you might expect, Daniel Perdomo, the so-called “mastermind” of the project, told Gizmag. So they got on YouTube and dug through web forums, learning enough about electronics and design to complete the project over the course of two years.
The next step for the Pong Project is figuring out a way to monetize their hard work. They’re currently looking for a “hardware incubator” to help produce these on a larger scale, which means it’ll be a long time before the Pong table winds up in an ironic “dive” bar near you. In the meantime, we’ve always got Oculus.