The Ultimate Pool Party: Interactive Animation Made With 65,000 Balls

If you wanted to create a screen on top of the water of a swimming pool to project a light installation, and you wanted it to be an interactive animation so swimmers could really experience it, how would you do it? You could do what Red Paper Heart did and dump 65,000 ping-pong balls into the swimming pool and use the surface of the balls as your screen. Since ping-pong balls are lightweight and easy to move around, people could swim right through them.

Sounds like a brilliant idea, right? Check out the pictures below. This was definitely the ultimate pool party. What you see are people actually swimming (and some synchronized dancers) frolicking through this interactive animation in the water.

When Red Paper Heart initially thought about creating this, they considered putting the projector on top of the water, which wouldn’t work. They considered shining the light through the water, but then it would be distorted. They ultimately decided on the ping-pong balls idea, which worked out perfectly.

According to their website, “To go with our new screen, we created an application which mapped to the pool and displayed a floating river of graphics, pulled by an invisible tide. Audio reactive visuals bumped along with the various DJ’s acts taking place poolside.”

It makes me wonder what other materials could be used as a screen for a light projection. Someone with a swimming pool at home could pull this off on a much smaller scale, and I bet it would still be the hit of the party. The only question is, where would you buy all those ping-pong balls? Swimming through those balls looks like a lot of fun. In order to really see the effect of this interactive animation, they encouraged everyone to get in the water. That is one pool party I would have attended!