Woz U

Table tennis is a great way to spend a Saturday afternoon in your friend ‘s basement or, for the more adept at hand-eye coordination, it could even be a way to compete in the Olympics. Whether you ‘re into the sport for fun or for competition, however; the game ‘s newest tool — a scorekeeper application called Triple Threat Table Tennis Tracker developed by Woz U students will be a big help.

To complete their Woz U 12-week Full Stack .NET training program, all students are challenged to complete a group project they devise. Three Phoenix students — Matthew Ploor, Christian Wunder and Richard Charay recently teamed up to put their new skills to the test and have a little fun as they took on the development of a real-time tracking system that sees and follows a table tennis game ball and awards points accordingly.

The idea behind the project was to use a Microsoft Xbox One Kinect sensor ‘s HD camera and IR camera to see and follow the game ball through 3D space. The team started by tracking the ball on x, y and z axes and then wrote logic that could determine when a point should be awarded. That information then gets presented on a screen. Other application features built by the team include:

• Manual point correction
• No touch app control via Kinect hand cursor
• Volley replay
• Check for bad serves, off table hits, and double bounces
• A log for table top hit locations
• Player statistics for both game and lifetime
• Store game data in the cloud (Azure)
• Automatically configure table location with one click
• Leaderboard for global and individual stats
• Hit locations stored by game

During their Woz U course work, Ploor, Wunder and Charay learned how to build web applications using AngularJS, TypeScript, C#, HTML and others. For the table tennis project though, the team used Windows Presentation Format — an entirely new application for all 3 students. The user interface was built with Google Materials and a back-end database was constructed to hold game and lifetime scores. Applying the knowledge they had gained in the coursework and following theoretical guidance from their instructor, the team successfully built a new, fully-functioning scorekeeper.

In the end, the project was a rewarding learning experience for the students — and a big win for table tennis players everywhere who are tired of haggling with their opponent over points.