Mind-Controlled Beer Pong Proves That Frat Boys Can Be Smart Too

Few games elicit as immediate and visceral a mental image of their players as beer pong. While it is a delightful drinking game that everyone can enjoy, most of us still immediately picture a group of frat boys tossing ping pong balls into red Solo cups filled with Keystone Light. But college fraternities are, by definition, filled with college students, and many of those fraternity brothers are smart and certainly not the stereotypical meatheads. If you need some proof, take a look at Ty Palowski’s mind-controlled beer pong game.

All jokes aside, we don’t actually know if Palowski was ever even in a fraternity. But he has certainly put a brainy twist on beer pong. This project started a few weeks back after Palowski published a YouTube video about his automated beer pong table. The table is outfitted with stepper motor sliders that move carriages back and forth. The sliders are mounted on the bottom side of each end of the table and have magnets attached to the carriages. Magnets are also attached to the red Solo cups that rest on top of the table. This increases the difficult when compared to traditional beer pong, as the cups are constantly moving. In his newest video Palowski upgraded his automated beer pong table with mind control headsets that make the game react to the players’ levels of intoxication.

Mind control was the realm of science fiction until fairly recently, but now it is surprisingly accessible thanks to cheap EEG (ElectroEncephaloGram) headsets. They aren’t capable of reading complex thoughts, but that can detect broad changes in your brain activity, like the difference between calm and excited states. In this case, Powalski is using cheap MindFlex headsets made by Mattel for basic mind-controlled games. He connected a Bluetooth transceiver to each MindFlex headset to provide communication to a computer. A program called Brainwave OSC interprets the data from the headsets. In this case, it is mostly parsing a spectrum between attention and meditation.

The idea to apply this to beer pong is to have the speed of the cup movement correlated to the user’s attention level. A person’s attention should, theoretically at least, decrease as they become more and more drunk. If the player is able to maintain their attention, the cups should stay mostly stationary. But, if their attention lapses, the computer will send a signal to an Arduino to activate the stepper motors on the sliders, causing them to move. The drunker they get, the more their attention starts to lapse. That causes the cups to move, making the game harder. As the game gets harder, the player drinks more. It’s a perfect self-fulfilling prophecy in delightful drinking game form.