I don’t recall getting to play in a ball pit until I was seventeen years old.

In high school I played a lot of jazz piano, and our band was pretty good. Our high school program had gotten kind of famous in the region (at least among the extremely small subset of Midwesterners who like jazz and for some reason know what’s happening in the world of high school bands), and at our busiest we played gigs three or four times a week and traveled to compete in all the regional festivals.

So we were staying at the Cincinnati Hilton, about 25 kids in several bands, due to play the Cincinnati Jazz Festival the next day. My high school was born of the 1970s alternative education movement and had a very relaxed philosophy about parental authority. Once we found our rooms, the chaperones all went to bed and said, “see you in the morning.” Naturally we broke out beers, partied for a while in our rooms, and eventually fanned out to explore the deserted hotel.

I have three vivid memories of that night, though I don’t remember how I got from A to B to C. A was popping my head into the hotel bar, where a cover band that consisted of not one person under 40 was playing the B-52’s “Loveshack” to an audience of one. I’ll always remember this as one of the cautionary tales that ultimately convinced me to forget about a musical career.

B was our discovery of the kids’ playground and the ball pit. There was a sign that said “no children over five” and obviously we ignored it. We played around in it for a while and had a blast. It really is a weird feeling, kind of like swimming in intensely buoyant water like the Dead Sea, and emerging perfectly dry.

C was much later, when nearly everyone had gone to bed and I found myself in the hot tub with two of my female classmates, naked, wondering exactly what I had done to please the gods so thoroughly that they granted me what was certainly in the top five of everything my seventeen-year-old heart had ever wished for.

Anyhow… Maybe it’s the playful, exploratory atmosphere of ITP, but one the first ideas that popped into my head as a project for Physical Computing is an interactive ball pit. That could mean a lot of things, but for the moment I’m thinking about a game.

Here’s the idea – unlike a traditional ball pit where the balls are all opaque colors, in this pit they are translucent white. Some of them have LEDs and RFID antennae embedded in them. So when the LEDs are off, the ‘hot balls’ (no, I can’t help myself) are indistinguishable from the rest. When one of them is on, it will glow, and hopefully radiate a diffuse glow through the other balls, even if it’s buried deep in the pit.

So the LED balls all flash for a moment, then all go off but one. That one remains on, and both teams try to grab it and throw it through the goal that their opponents are protecting. There is a limited time to try to score a goal, and then the LEDs all flash and a new ball becomes “hot.”

There is a color gradation too: most often the hot ball glows red, which means you have to throw it through the opponent’s red (easiest) goal for one point. Less often, it glows green, and if you get it in your opponent’s green goal, it’s three points. And occasionally it glows blue, and the blue (very small) goal is worth 10 points.

The game can be played one-on-one, two-on-two, etc. depending on the size of the pit (and the players).

I spent much too much time today building a model for the ball pit in Google Sketchup (above).

This version is 12′ x 18′ and 11′ tall. The pit itself is 9′ x 15′ and 3′ deep for a volume of 405 cubic feet. I have absolutely no idea how much 405 cubic feet of translucent plastic balls would cost. I’ll check it out when I have time.

I would welcome any suggestions for games or any other uses for this thing.

In my wildest dreams, you could embed a multicolored LED into every single ball, and have each ball serve as a pixel in a video image – and the balls would be smart enough to know where they are on the X-Y coordinate of the “screen” so you could throw them around and the image would remain intact. But that’s a bit outside the horizon of my current budget and skills…