You Built What?! A Flashing, Tilting Ping-Pong Table to Throw Off Opponents

Earning Their Stripes Robb Godshaw and Jisu Choi built their table from less than $100 worth of parts. Jeff Newton

Internships more often than not are mindless, coffee-fetching black holes of boredom. But not at Syyn Labs, a Los Angeles collective that creates unusual interactive art and science projects for commercials and music videos. Last summer, student interns Hoon Oh, Robb Godshaw and Jisu Choi took it upon themselves to reinvent the sport of table tennis. Their project could pass for an extra in Transformers: It’s part ping-pong table, part machine, and so difficult to play that it reduces pros to the level of rank amateurs.

Oh came up with the idea of doing a ping-pong project in part because the game is a staple of so many cultures, and is normally relatively easy to play. The group wanted to make the game more social than competitive, so they eliminated the potential for humiliating one-sided contests by building a table that tilts on demand and makes it tough for even highly skilled players.

They started by scrounging for parts in the Syyn Labs warehouse. A rectangular piece of plexiglass that had once been used in an illuminated dance floor became the tabletop. To drive the tilting surface, Godshaw suggested using pneumatic pistons left over from a commercial for a Google science fair. Choi worked on the drive system and other aspects of the design, while Oh wrote software to control the pistons and switch the table from level to off-kilter. The group found that getting the angles correct was tricky. “We wanted to make it tilt at a dramatic angle but not hit anybody in the jaw,” Godshaw says.

Pneumatic Pistons Drive the Tilting Surface:  Jeff Newton

At the same time, they worked on the frame and legs. An early version using two-by-fours proved too heavy (they wanted to be able to easily transport the table). Outside the warehouse, Godshaw found a pile of scrap metal tossed aside by the lab’s previous occupant, a paint company. They kept the wooden frame beneath the acrylic surface but replaced the legs with the scrap metal to limit weight. The legs held, but during an early test, one of the pneumatic cylinders failed. When they took it apart, they saw that it was encrusted with sugar; it had been used to squirt colorful liquids in the contraption Syyn Labs had designed for the Google commercial and had fruit juice residue inside.

Thankfully, they found another cylinder, and after adding a few extra touches, including a pair of flashbulbs to help players blind their opponents, the interns got their “Swing Pong” table working. They were right about leveling gameplay—when table-tennis pro Adam Bobrow visited Syyn Labs, he won his match by only a single point. In fact, the game is such strange, absurd fun, Godshaw says, that competition is an afterthought: “Most games never make it to 9.”

See how the game works on the next page.