Building a table tennis game for three players

Physical leisure activities such as table tennis provide healthy exercise and can offer a means to connect with others socially; however, players have to be in the same physical location to play. Networked computer games support players in geographically distant locations, but their communication channel is often limited to text or audio only. Furthermore, recent input devices that encourage exertion often do not support adequate force-feedback. We have developed a networked table tennis-like game that is played with a real paddle and ball, augmented with a large-scale videoconference. Similar to networked computer games, this concept can support more than two locations, while simultaneously aiming to provide similar benefits known from traditional physical leisure activity such as exercise, enjoyment and bringing people together to socialize.