Poong is a game of pong, but with two O’s, like eyes, cause you control the game with your eyes. It’s very clever.

For this self-directed project, I chose to teach myself TouchDesigner. Lacking a large installation space, I wanted to instead explore the interactive capabilities of the software in a more intimate way. The notion of the gaze became very interesting to me, because looking is a way of navigating space without physically affecting it. It is the most delicate way one can interact with a space. And so inverting this delicacy—creating impact from merely sight—was highly compelling.

I was able to use the ZigSim Pro mobile app to stream in FaceID data from my iPhone, and then used TouchDesigner to roughly calculate where the viewer was looking at the screen. With that information, I was able to produce a simple game of pong. Limiting the gaze-control to only one axis helped to reduce the margin of error in the calculations and increased playability. Using what I learned in this project and from other sketches, I ran an introduction to TouchDesigner class for WashU’s Fox Friday workshop series, enable students and faculty to produce intro-level TouchDesigner projects.