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Modding Laser Tag Gear?

Posted by simoniker on from the blam-blam dept.

digitalsushi writes "With summer here again our thoughts turn to the outdoors, and for two years, my peers and I have tried to find plans online for augmenting our laser tag gear to make it more realistic. We're not engineers, but also figured it can't be that hard to do something with some kind of infrared laser to decrease the beam width. What other sorts of inexpensive things could be added to our gear to make it more interesting? We're using the popular Laser Challenge V2 kits, but any brand at all would be interesting."

6 of 599 comments (clear)

  1. the annoying "buzz" by Cruciform · · Score: 5, Interesting

    A bunch of college kids we knew were addicted to playing "Laser Quest, and tried encouraging us (paintball fans) to play.

    What a joke.

    There's no real incentive not to get shot, besides the lack of points. With paintball you know when you've been hit, because it hurts like hell. Laser Quest's hits resulted in your vest buzzing and your gun not working for a few seconds.

    Plus there was no running or ducking in the arena.

    Suggestions of wiring eletrodes to the vest to zap players were met with blank stares and hostility. I still think that's the way to go... modify them from "laser tag" to "pain gun tag" :)

  2. Remote Bomb Detonators by wwest4 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The "Laser Challenge" sets have a bomb that is ordinarily set off with a toggle switch - one direction for slow fuse, another for long fuse. It's a fairly simple hack to rip out the switch and substitute with an SCR and an IR photoresistor to allow remote detonation of the short fuse option. Then you can set minefields and set them off from a safe distance - Laser Geneva Conventions be damned!

  3. Wide range laser-tag by darth_MALL · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Here's a mod i just thought of. Go about your daily business. Provide each player with a locator and a gun. Rig the locators to let you know when an opponent (also with a locator) is within a certain range (ie. 50 yds.). Begin panicked drawing of gun and be the first to find and kill the opponent. You must carry the gear at all times, and you must play regardless of your location, say in a classroom or at a wedding. This might be sweet as a campus-wide game. Even better if you don't know who the opponents are!

  4. Some random ideas. by NoMoreNicksLeft · · Score: 5, Interesting

    1) Sensors on the gun, that if triggered, disable it for a few seconds.
    2) Somehow, build a bunch of smaller sensors, and by this I mean alot. If every person has to wear coveralls that have a few hundred sensors on them, it's alot harder to cheat and just cover yours with your hand.
    3) Have a wearable computer that interprets the sensor data. Not sure how to have it affect gameplay, but it seems you could tell the difference between a "kill" and a "flesh wound".
    4) If you have an arena of sorts, have sensors on the outdoor lights for night play. Would be cool to "shoot them out".
    5) Have lots of little 4" x 4" mirrors up in odd places, for bank shots.
    6) Have everyone wear GPS. Send the output to a modified quake server... let people from around the world watch the virtual version of the game.

  5. Laser Challenge V2 by auburnate · · Score: 5, Interesting
    The Laser Challenge V2 is known to have a wide beam width. It means you could hit a target 50 ft away by aiming anywhere from ~15 feet to the left of the target to ~15 feet to the right of the target. Definitely not realistic. A simple mod would be putting tape across the IR diode with a pin-sized hole in the tape. Play around with the diameter of the hole for best results.

    But as a side note, Laser Challenge V2 makes you wear the receiver on your chest, and its an easy thing to cover the receiver with your arms as you shoot at your opponents. You almost need multiple receivers which can monitor hits from all directions, but who wants to buy multiple Laser Challenge V2 setups for one person.

    Paintball turns your entire body into receivers. If you crank down the velocity of your markers, you increase the number of people than can stand ( pain threshold ) to get tagged by a paintball. Remember, safety first ( googles and cups? for our male /.ers ).

  6. not quite a mod, but... by ChipMonk · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Back when I was in college, and Laser Tag was relatively new, some smart-aleck wag figured out that it was nothing more than a glorified remote control.

    He got a programmable remote (a real one, that read another remote's signal, then duplicated it), put the Laser Tag signal into it, and voila! He had the Laser Tag equivalent of a sawed-off shotgun. He could take out several players at once with it. And often did.