Chirp Pong

Simon Willison made an experiment called Chirp Pong, using pure static HTML to transmit game state via sound waves (chirp) between two nearby phones for two-player competition, without using Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, or a data cable.

Chirp Pong's architecture is pure static HTML, with no backend, no WebSocket, and no WebRTC; the game state is encoded as an audio signal played through the speaker, and the other end captures and decodes it using the Web Microphone API.

In close-range scenarios, Chirp Pong's sound-wave communication scheme is usable (the original judgment was 'It seems to work').

In the prompt given to the model, the author explicitly required breaking Pong's monotony and making a two-player competitive Pong-like game in which players hold their phones together, the game state is transmitted through audio noise and parsed by the Web Microphone API, and graphics and gameplay variations are added to make it more interesting and more intertwined than Pong.

The Chirp Pong scheme has clear limitations: it is sensitive to the distance between the two devices (they must be close), reliability drops in noisy environments, limited audio encoding bandwidth restricts game complexity, and simultaneous sending and receiving at both ends requires handling self-hearing echo.

Chirp Pong will not replace serious multiplayer online solutions in the short term; its value lies in prototype validation: when quickly validating a two-player interaction concept, sound waves are a viable path.

Chirp Pong is a publicly accessible web page that works as soon as it is opened, requiring no installation, account, or network configuration.

Chirp Pong gives up reliability and generality in exchange for the property of requiring no pairing and no infrastructure beyond permission pop-ups.

For medium-complexity experimental projects such as Chirp Pong, AI programming assistants can already handle the main implementation work.