I made my first table tennis web app

Super, just guessed the first serve with success. Nice application and training tool at that. Congratulations for the brilliant idea!

Well, I knew from the starting pic what would be the serve, so you gave away too much.

regiz.rugenz wrote: This is awesome! though I  predicted the first 2 serves w/ success (not aced), I totally flunk then on the next succeeding serves.. which is as close to reality for I totally suck in reading serves..  Perhaps changing one of the selection box to side spin rather than top spin might be a better choice.. I guess few more tweaks and this is about to go viral.

When I was first developing the app, I had a 9-square dialpad style option for the spin, with the middle being flat/no spin, and the 8 squares around representing various combinations of spin (top + right side, pure top, top + left) and so on.

But the problem is, it's a bit tricky to interpret whether something is pure topspin, or top with a little bit of right. I didn't want people to get wrong answers because I interpreted the spin slightly differently from them, so I decided to just simplify it to top/backspin. This will be very sad for Kenta Matsudaira's serves, but for most of the other players it's enough.

Imago wrote: Sidespin is almost always there, so topspin and backspin is fine for now.

The other thing is because I'm using ITTF videos, the camera angle often completely hides the serve. I don't want people to spend lots of time trying to replay the video to get the exact spin, and then get it wrong because it's not quite the same as I thought.

In the end this is meant to be a fun game and the only real way to train service receive is to touch the ball with your bat, so I prefer to keep the UI simple and let people watch more serves than spend a lot of time on each one.

nice

Awesome message when a serve is successfully analysed! Great app so far! Would love to see it develop!

LUCKYLOOP wrote: To simulate a real situation, let the viewer guess, after you show them the ball contact on the paddle before it comes off it.

Actually, the problem here is the limitation of HTML5 video and browser accuracy when it comes to timings. It's quite hard to pause reliably on a specific frame, which you will see if you repeatedly play the videos in different browsers. My plan is to get 30-50 serves into the database, and then review feedback on specific serves (this is why I provide the serve id at the bottom of the page) and tweak the ones that people feel are too easy to guess.

Johnny.d.p wrote: Awesome message when a serve is successfully analysed! Great app so far! Would love to see it develop!

Thanks!

I plan to have several funny messages from which it will randomly pick one to display, but right now I'm busy editing videos to add more serves to the app.

Rhainur wrote: LUCKYLOOP wrote: To simulate a real situation, let the viewer guess, after you show them the ball contact on the paddle before it comes off it. Actually, the problem here is the limitation of HTML5 video and browser accuracy when it comes to timings. It's quite hard to pause reliably on a specific frame, which you will see if you repeatedly play the videos in different browsers. My plan is to get 30-50 serves into the database, and then review feedback on specific serves (this is why I provide the serve id at the bottom of the page) and tweak the ones that people feel are too easy to guess.

Thanks for all the great feedback guys. I've been working on the app all afternoon and am off to play some table tennis now :D

I've added 10 more serves into the database, including some female players. Serve #20 (you can load specific serves by using the text box at the bottom) is one of my all time favourites, and I wonder how many would actually have touched that ball.

Based on feedback, I've also made the answer + the replay button stay until you click on "next serve", so that you can repeat a serve after attempting to predict it.

Please do tell your friends/ about it/share it on Facebook if you like it, and try it on your phones and tell me if the page works there. This is a completely free web app with no ads, so all I have to keep me happy is my pageview count :D

Yeeeey! I only got two right! My feedback would be that the "Show me a few milliseconds more" button is unnecessary, I always press it, so might as well skip this one and show as much of the serve as you're will show.

I do show the correct answer :P

It plays the full serve after you answer.

very cool!  Brilliant!  Great job on the cool app!

Edited by regiz.rugenz - 05/13/2014 at 12:21am

Yes, probably the optimal and fair videotip has to include the contact point. Now we have to guess/anticipate what would be the final move of the wrist before the contact with the ball.