alt Hacker NewsChirp Pong – uses microphones and audio for networked game play
Comments
Fun idea, Simon!
I wonder if the game state could be sent in an analog/continuous encoding rather than as encoding of a digital state. So that the human player could learn to roughly interpret the sounds, or at least figure out that the sounds are correlated with what’s happening.
That might have a different, possibly satisfying feel compared to the current bloops.
State would not be reconstructed bit-perfect but for a model of a physical system like pong, approximate might be ok.
Simon Willison:
Another game experiment - I wanted to see if it was feasible to have a two player game on two separate phones running in static HTML where the networking code uses chirps sent via the microphone. It seems to work!
Build a two player competitive pong like game where two players use their phones close to each other and the game state is sent via audio noises which the web microphone API can interpret - but add graphical and gameplay twists to make it a lot more fun and intertwine than pong
Claude Opus 5.5 Extra in Claude Code.
Tags: game-design, ai, generative-ai, llms, claude-code
Very cool! How much bandwidth can you get using this method?
How many tokens was that in the end?
Why not use this technology to build a chat application?
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In the middle of playing my very first round with one of my adult children, the other adult child audio recorded part of our game and started replaying their recording to disrupt the rest of our game. All in good fun and we laughed pretty hard. Also, we had fun with the game.