I’d wager that you’re probably familiar with laser tag even if you’ve never played it. At the Disrupt NY Hackathon developers from a company called Laser Mountain showed off a new laser tag system using Android smartphones as game servers. Those Android smartphones were attached to Nerf guns.
The Android-powered smartphones were used to create a real-time game score server. The smartphones are used to track the player movement using built-in gyroscopes and transmit the data captured to a Node.js server. The developers made use of the microphone built into the Android-powered smartphones to determine when players were firing their weapons.
The smartphone microphone listens for the sound of the Nerf gun firing to register when the trigger is pulled. If you’ve ever played with Nerf guns, you know that the noise it makes when you fire is very loud. If you’re intrigued by the idea of Android-powered laser tag using nothing but Nerf guns and Android smartphones, you aren’t alone.
Naturally, the developers are holding back on a lot of the details of exactly how their system works. However, they do say that they will be putting their system up on Kickstarter. One of the coolest things about this very interesting Android-powered laser tag system is that the developing duo built the product in only 24 hours.
[via TechCrunch]
Very cool concept, but I’m not strapping my phone to a toy gun.