Human tetris

Monday, April 21, 2008 1:45 PM

Tetris is one of the all-time classic video games, but it’s best suited to people with a lot of free time on their hands. Apparently, though, maneuvering those little polygons around a video screen still wasn’t enough of a time suck for Swiss artist Guillaume Reymond. So, he set to work on a real-life version of the game with people in place of pixels.

Using an auditorium as the "board," he outfitted small groups of extras in colored shirts and sat them close together to form the various Tetris shapes. Then he took nearly 900 pictures from an overhead view, moving the groups slightly and adding new ones in each frame. When shown in rapid succession, the photos give the illusion that the pieces are rotating and descending just as they do in the video game. They even appear to vanish when they form a line across an entire row of seats.



Japanese have their own version. Human Tetris emerged on the Japanese game show known as “Tunnels no Minasan no Okage Deshita”. Contestants on the show are grouped into teams, usually the Blue and Red team. The goal of the teams is to squeeze themselves through a pink foam wall, which sometimes has human-like shapes in it. If they cannot find a way to fit through the wall as it lurches towards them, they are pushed into a pool of water.





Human Tetris website also contains sexy bikini girls version of the show, where sexy girls are contestants.