These robots are able to track the movement of the tiny table tennis ball and return it with a satisfying wack, thanks to a motion-control system that comes equipped with a built-in camera and a processing unit. These ‘bots were unveiled by a lab at the Zhejiang University in China. The robots each are 5’3″ high and weigh 121 pounds. It took the lab 4 years to develop them.

Pretty soon, you’ll be able to play real tennis on a court with a robot as a partner. While you might think that might be a bit more complicated to pull off, a Vietnamese toy company already took a shot at that idea a few years back and recently revealed this intimidating upgrade…

[via Far East Gizmos]

The “Hyper Ping Pong” table tennis game does away with all those pesky balls, tables, and opponents, replacing them with a single paddle for one player. As the player swings the ping pong paddle around, it outputs realistic sounds to simulate a rally with a non-existent Player Two. You need to listen for the sound and speed of the ball to time your returns properly. A motion sensor in the paddle then detects whether or not you “hit” the non-existent ball. Here, check out the silliness in action:

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Well, that sure looks like fun for at least 2 minutes. And what was the deal with that guy’s red shoes? I suppose if you don’t already own a Wii, Kinect or PlayStation Move, it’s a way for you to play some solo games, but frankly it just looks ridiculous. If you really must have one, you’ll need to wait until October, at which point it will go on sale for ¥1980 (~$24 USD). Or you could just buy a couple of real paddles, an actual ball, and play with another human being.

[UPDATE: If you don't live in Japan, you can get order Table Tennis for One over at Gizmine for $39.99 (USD)]

[via DigInfo.TV]

The clock looks a lot like the ones you might see on the outside of a bank, but uses ping-pong balls as the diffusers on top of a 15×7 matrix of LEDs. The LEDs are pressed into a piece of pegboard, and the display is run by an ATmega168 and a Maxim DS3232 real-time clock, connected in a circuit consisting mostly of transistors and wires. When turned off, the whole thing looks rather unassuming – like a bunch of ping-pong balls glued to a piece of wood. Oh yeah, that’s what it is.

While this particular build is designed to work as a clock, there’s no particular reason you couldn’t apply the same idea to make a giant version of a PONG clock – which I think would be more appropriate, given the work materials. You can find the full DIY guide for the ping-pong clock over at Hack A Day.

This time, they’ve trained a pair of their flying machines to bounce ping-pong balls between them. By mounting the head of a tennis racket to each one, and carefully positioning them, they’re able to get the ball to volley between the two. Here’s a video of the exciting ball juggling action.

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I guess it’s more like a round of ping-pong than “juggling” per se, but it’s still pretty impressive. Sure it’s not like watching Nadal and Federer go at it, but they drop the ball fewer times than I usually do. What do you think the Swiss will teach their quadrocopters to do next? I hope they’ll get them to make some watches and chocolate.

[via YouTube]

The Ping Pong Cover from Incase sells for $30 (USD) and you get the choice of black, red, clover, or electric blue. The red and clover colors are best in my opinion, as they really look like ping pong paddles.

If you’re nutty enough to use your iPhone as a paddle, rest assured that the texture is the same as a normal, cheap paddle, so you probable could play with it if you’re really accurate and have a good grip.

[via Book of Joe via DVice]

The TT Champion Bat is made by Shinobii Technologies and will be available for $70 “pretty soon”. It’s supposed to be an accurate reproduction of a ping pong paddle. I’m all for novelty, but this is getting ridiculous.

Maybe if you really enjoy table tennis that much, you should just buy a real paddle and play on a real table instead of a Wii. It would be way cheaper, depending on the quality of your table tennis paddles.

[via Ubergizmo]

Well with these unusual ping-pong paddles called Brodmann Blades, you don’t have to worry about that anymore. Just set the dual-sided ping-pong mitten over your playing hand, and you’re ready to play. The blades’ ergonomic design is said to improve your connection with the ball, and provides a larger sweet spot that traditional paddles.

Sure, you might look a little silly doing it, but with your hand wrapped in one of these, you’ll trounce your opponents playing with old school paddles.

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You can get your hands on (or is that in?) a pair of Brodmann Blades, along with a handy carrying case, 2 matching terry wristbands, and 4 ping pong balls over at Hammacher Schlemmer for $99.95 (USD).

For me the funniest thing about the whole prank is the sheer number of balls fired by the robot. But who knows, maybe this will make your day so here’s the video:

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If I had the nerdery necessary to build a ping pong-firing robot, I’d hide it in the men’s bathroom and make it fire at anyone who pees. Or I’d aim at anyone who dares fall asleep in the office. Or I’d make it so anyone who says a certain word or phrase gets ping ponged. What I wouldn’t do is simply aim it at someone’s office and have it fire away relentlessly but at low velocities, which quickly devolves the prank to an annoying and awkward event. Unfortunately I’m not a nerd. At the moment I don’t even have an office to go to.

[via BotJunkie]

For his work titled 905, artist maybites suspended 67 strings of ping pong balls in a cylindrical formation, with each ball acting as a sort of pixel for projecting digital images. As an individual enters the cylinder of balls, a webcam tracks the person’s movements which in turn impact the images displayed on the ping pong balls.

By setting up a special mirror in the ceiling, the projector beams are reflected onto the surfaces of the white balls, creating an ethereal glow that almost looks like the light is emanating from the balls themselves.

Here’s a short video clip showing off the ping pong ball light curtain in action:

From the looks of it, maybites created the installation in late 2007, but there’s no information on when or where you can see 905 in person. For now, I guess you’ll just have to settle for the pictures and video above. Or you could always try and make your own ping pong projection screen.

The gun has a magazine that can fire up to 14 shots. It takes a few seconds to load the ammo – i.e. a ping pong ball – and prepare the gun, but there’s no doubt that it’s lethal.

Kissinger also injected water into ping pong balls, creating some plywood-destroying, extra strength ammo.

Here’s the gun in action:

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Don’t try this at home. You might have too much fun.

[via TinyEnormous via OhGizmo]

Thankfully, placing this penguin on top of your television will not cause it to explode, but it will, let you play a table tennis video game using a wireless remote paddle controller. I probably don’t have to tell you this, but I’m pretty sure that you’re not going to get a Wii quality experience here. That said, if you’re too cheap to buy a modern console, or just enjoyed both Happy Feet and Balls of Fury (boy, does that sound strange), then this system is for you.

The console not only plays ping pong, but another 23 supposedly “16-bit” video games as well. I haven’t been able to scrounge up any pictures of the console itself, or screenshots any of the games the system plays, but the description sounds strikingly similar to this far less compelling non-penguin version I found over on eBay, which includes such wonderful sounding games as Agreesorunder, Bounce Wavebug, S-Move Space, Mag Fox and Survivor Tryst – which sounds alot like a reality TV show.

If you’re interested in checking one out, you can find these oddities over at Philippine electronics outlet Electrobrain Enterprises for $30 bills (USD).

Builders Vern Graner and Rick Abbott of The Robot Group used a Parallax inkjet print head kit and the EFX-TEK Prop-2 controller board to bring their wondrous creation to life. As each ball leaves the hopper, it’s loaded onto a rotating platform, and sprayed with tiny ink droplets.

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The best part: the balls it prints are used as ammunition for the group’s other dastardly invention, the pneumatic, ping pong ball firing PONGINATOR!

[Nuts N Volts via Hacked Gadgets]

I’m not really sure why they’re being called “3-in-1″, since I can’t think of anything else they could be used as besides ping pong paddles. Maybe they’re thinking you can flip pancakes and use them for fraternity hazing rituals?

According to the packaging, these cheap Chinese paddles are actually for the “Wü” console, a clear indication that they’re not officially sanctioned by Nintendo. A pair of paddles (one black, one red) will set you back about $16.

The installation contains a 2-meter by 3-meter display board which is injected with 2700 ping pong balls from a dispensing cabinet which contains tubs of 6 differently colored balls. Custom software analyzes the input image, then renders the image row by row until the picture is complete. Each time a new image is uploaded, the machine recirculates the balls and the whole process starts all over again.

See it in action below (youtube video):

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

[via Neatorama]