Pong is 3D?

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Pong is 3D?


GamePlayer:  Video games certainly have come a long way since you
first exploited the medium to create Pong.

Randy Mutt:  There are some interesting new games out there, and there
have been some improvements in the hardware.

GP:  Wouldn't you say that there have been some big advancements in
the software as well?

RM:  This is a common misconception.  The 3D engines you see running
some of the newer flight simulators and virtual reality products are
essentially no different than the engine Pong used.

GP:  So you're saying Pong used a 3D graphics rendering engine?

RM:  Certainly.

GP:  But there were no 3D graphics in the game.
 
RM:  That's not true.  The screen displayed real-time rendered
versions of fully three dimensional models.  We used trilinear
mip-mapping for the textures and ray tracing to get the shading right.

GP:  Textures?  Shading?

RM:  For reasons of game design and aesthetics, the textures we used
were all flat white for the foreground and black for the background,
but this wasn't a limitation of engine per se.  The light source is
modeled as a large bank of fluorescent lights placed above the camera.

GP:  I see...  But the camera never moves.

RM:  The camera did move in the alpha version of the program, but we
found that this confused players during play-testing, so we made it
stationary. But the3D effects can still be seen, since the paddles and 
the ball follow curved paths in-space.

GP:  It looks like the paddles and the ball are going in straight
lines on a plane.

RM:  That's not true, the paddle actually travels in a semicircular
path in a dimensional volume.  It is closest to the camera when it
appears in the center of its path.  The two players are not at the
same height either.  If we were to move the camera a little to the
side, you'd see that the left player is actually a lot higher than the
player on the right.

GP:  But then shouldn't one paddle appear larger than the other?  And
wouldn't they shrink and expand as the player moved his paddle to
various positions on the semicircle?

RM:  Well no, because we also used a technique that allowed us to
morph our 3D models on the fly.  As the paddle gets closer to the
camera, it is actually shrinking in size.  The model-morphing,
combined with theD engine, makes the paddle appear to be the same
size when rendered on the 2D viewing plane.  We morphed the ball's
model too, to get a similar effect.


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