On Friday evening, Philadelphians were treated to a larger-than-life version of a gaming classic. The side of the Cira Cenre — a 29-story building lined with programmable lights — was turned into a massive Pong game, letting players control three-story-high paddles via a laptop. Dr. Frank Lee, the Drexel University professor who programmed the show, was inspired by seeing the Cira Centre’s lights five years ago. “For whatever reason, I saw in my mind’s eye… Tetris shapes outlined by those lights, falling and twisting and rotating,” he told Polygon. To make the game work, he had to connect a port of Pong to the building’s roughly 1,500 LEDs, using both the building’s own light-show software and another program created to communicate with it.
via The Verge
April 22, 2013
