The Ultimate Laser Tag Game (Asked by the ultimate noob)

Alright, I'm gonna be frank here, I have next to no knowledge on the arduino platform. I recently began gathering information on general programming (learning basic C++ and Python) with the goal of putting together a laser tag system for me and my friends to enjoy. Problem is, I'm not simply looking to put together a dinky point, shoot, die sort of game, I'm looking for the real deal. Time and money spent really aren't issues to me, but I am curious at the feasibility and relative difficulty of an IR system that includes these features:

  1. Hit points - most games use a one hit and done format but I want it to be hit point based, with different values set to different sensors on the body (headshots worth more than chest, arms etc.)

  2. Distance tracking - The farther away a shot is fired from, the less hit points deducted.

  3. Respawn zones - Instead of being knocked out for a set period of time, I would like to be able to retreat to safe zones that I can set up to revive a player.

  4. Customization and Leveling - The biggie. I'd like to be able to have the guns be "logged into" via magstripe cards or RFID, which then changes the properties of the gun based on settings in a separate computer based program. This would allow changes in rate of fire, laser power, reload speed etc. based on the level and individual settings of a player. I'd also like "special abilities" to be allowed, where a player can preset 4 buttons on the gun to do different things (Think of passive vs. active abilities in RPG's).

I've done an absolutely horrid job in explaining this I know, and left out many other features I would like to include, but any help would be appreciated, even if it's just a jumping off point. Most of you will probably recommend that I get familiar with the Arduino platform before I try and tackle such a hefty project, but I want to use this project as my gateway into the programming sphere, correcting mistakes and discovering as I go.

It does indeed sound like an ambitious project :). If this is what drives you to create, then I say go for it.

I think what you want to do is very feasible (obviously, since it's been done before in various ways) and I like your take on the game. I think the distance tracking is the only real hurdle here. While it's certainly possible to calculate distance from an object using a laser, the nature of the game means that you will want to seriously avoid reflective materials both in your arena and on your gear. If you don't, false positives will be a real problem. Of course that creates a problem measuring the reflection of the laser for the purpose of distance tracking. You could feasibly use RFID to track location of players in the arena, calculating the length of the shot based on those positions, if you don't want really fine resolution. Honestly I think you may be okay without that feature, since long-distance shots have a built-in reward through security of your position. If you really want it though I'm sure you'll find a way.

The rest of the project is pretty straightforward. The packaging of everything will take some serious work, and may take more time than the rest of it put together. If money is no object, I highly recommend investing in a 3d printer to prototype your gear. Also, let me use it when you're not :wink:

You could feasibly use RFID to track location of players in the arena,

No you can't.

RFID will not tell you anything about location unless you plan to cover the entire area in RFID readers and as they interfere with each other, it is a non starter.

Grumpy_Mike:

You could feasibly use RFID to track location of players in the arena,

No you can't.

RFID will not tell you anything about location unless you plan to cover the entire area in RFID readers and as they interfere with each other, it is a non starter.

I refer you to http://lmgtfy.com/?q=dense+RFID+reader+deployment

Have you read any of those links. They have nothing to do with tracking the LOCATION of a token. They are for use in wear housing whereupon have a lot of readers.
I still maintain that you can not track the location of someone using an RFID tag. I used to design RFID readers for a living.

Hello !

How nice to see someone else is taking up on the laser tag project. I am part of a dedicated group to develop and play with a homebuilt lasertag system, arduino at its core. If you dont have any experience in programming the atmega328 you will be in for an adventurous ride, and 400+ pages of datasheet :wink:

The things you want, they are possible. I will make a few observations based on my experience:

  • different hitpoints on the body: this can be done, but remember: you are not shooting a single "bullet" at your target, but rather a big "smear" with cross area of about 1 square meter. You are most likely to trigger multiple sensors in multiple areas. My tagger is designed so you do need a red dot to acquire and hit a target, but tests point out that you have a rather large hitbox around the sensor.

  • second in this: each sensor should be tracked seperately; this will take some extra processing time from the arduino, but I guess that with tight programming it might just work out

  • damage as a function of range: pretty hard. Pretty damn hard. Because IR does not measure range. Since money is no issue: connect a gps to the arduino, this yields location, location from every player gives you distance between shots. You might actually use the gps from an android phone, I've been looking in to that to create UAV (like in cod games), but that is temporarily on halt. To communicate this data you could use Mobile Network of a WiFi, or an XBee extension for your arduino

  • I have no experience with the RFID tags but think it's a nice take on the weapons to be identified by the RFID tag

  • programming buttons to do what you want is no problem at all.

Since this is "Project Guidance" I would suggest to first

  • learn to build IR packets
  • learn to receive and decode them, optional error correction
  • learn to do this at the same time with callback functions - worth it
  • build a simple IR game which identifies players and let's you hit others

regarding the casing: I'm working with sewer pipes (because they are sturdy), but if you can work aluminium, go for it: lovely results.

A site which helped me a lot is http://www.laserforums.com/forum/showthread.php/5436-Zachtos-50-cal-metal-build; The site might give a warning of a potential virus, but it seems to be a false positive, but just so you know. The creator of the post has his own arduino version of laser tag.

Happy building !

Cheers,

Jack

It's a very ambitious project and somewhere in the same ballpark of what I am working on with someone else.

How much experience do you have with real life combat games? Do you have any software/hardware experience in IR/Laser/Airsoft/Paintball? How much experience do you have with electronics hardware, uC programming, database and web application development?

Even if you have extensive electronics/software experience and calabilities, Your first hurdle is a practical optical system. I actually know one of the guys that has developed one of the best laser based systems in the country. This is military grade for training and has a 10 inch beam spread at 1000 metres. Most 'laser' tag systems are actually IR and only used at fairly close range with quite wide beam spreads, so detecting hits at specific points on the body is impractical.

I'd have thought that a hit from a longer distance would be worth more points, not less.

Tracking players in a game zone is difficult and expensive. I've looked at RFID for various things, including tracking entry and exit from a game zone, but not for tracking position within. You could have checkpoints that would give you the last known position, but that's about it. For proper tacking you need GPS and a means of getting that info back to your system. This would be radio, but you then need to cover your playing area with radio repeaters/gateways to get the GPS data back to the system for each player. Again, I've looked into this but for props within the game zone, ratherthan the players.

One thing that is possible is IF you have players using smart phones. IF you have a wifi network deployed, or 3G access, you can provide a web based system for the player to access. The page they access can requsest location data from a built-in GPS and log the data. To keep this open you'd need to do it via an App though, as when the phone goes into standby, or navigates away, the page can no longer access the GPS data.

Respawns are possible. Using RFID you could control access back into the game zone after respawn.

If you wanted to control the properties of weapons then every one would need to be hooked into the system, meaning radio links again. You would have to have RFID on the weapon itself, where the user has to place their tag in it during use. Otherwise there would be nothing to stop a different person taking a weapon that is already pre-programmed.

It's a massive project, involving the right optical systems, detectors, uC, sensors, RFiD, GPS, radio, wireless or wired Ethernet, web database and application.

It's possible, in general terms, but it's a LOT of work, a complex interlinked system, and you may have to be very creative in some areas and compromise in others

It seems to me that your ideas would make a game far more enjoyable.

I agree with the other views that measuring the distance will be the hardest problem. The only practical approach I can see is to put target markers on the people and do real-time video processing on the gun. I imagine that people in the know would be able to find ways to hide the markers if they wanted, so you could design the system so that when the range could not be determined it assumed close range - this gives no incentive for the targets to try to defeat it. Once the video processor has recognised the marker, estimating the distance is relatively easy. The AR people have cracked the marker detection problem quite thoroughly and you don't need to create any of this - only provide a fast enough platform for it to run on. It would make it possible to give feedback to the shooter of what range they were at, if you wanted.

@Tack: very nice, are you affiliated with laserforums as well ? With regards to range: a long ranged sniper shot will yield more points, but for most taggers the decrease in damage done is to simulate damage drop over distance - like in any call of duty game (or games of that type).

With regard to the optical system: a TSAL6100 IR led can be pulsed with 1 Amp to increase range, combined with a 50 mm diameter lens (focal length about 11 cm) from a sherlock holmes magnifier and a 10 mm diafragma gives a beam width of ~1 meter at 12 meters distance. Not as good as 10 inch at 1000 m, but acceptable for what we want: hipfire doesn't get you any hits, aiming down sights does.

It is possible to use an IR laser to achieve greater range and accuracy, but safety-issues make it more tedious to implement.

RT video processing is - as far as I know - not possible with the arduino itself. However, I did find some shields which will do some of the work (they have a dedicated video processing chip, most likely a xilinx or something like it), though mostly still on BW images.

Don't let this stop you: the ideas are sound, it will yield a fun game, the making of it is lots of fun, but start out simple and see what technology works best for you.

No, nothing to do with laser forum. The stuff I'm working on is primarily for scenario paintball and airsoft.

The chap who owns our home site also does a lot of military training and has developed a true laser system. There is also the IRTactical stuff that is being franchised in the UK by some other guys I know.

I love the idea of adding more interactivity using technology. What we're doing is using uC based props and communications to make games more interactive and carry out automatic scoring and visualisation of game play via live maps of the gaming area showing objectives held and scoring in progress.

It's slow progress but one of the first things we've done is build a smart replacement for old cloth flags on a rope. An electronic version uses ultra bright LED's for visuals, plus carries out automated scoring based on lots of different configuration options. The live data is then sent back to a database driven web application for collation with other objective locations and display on a map of the game zone showing territories held by particular teams.

Grumpy_Mike:
Have you read any of those links. They have nothing to do with tracking the LOCATION of a token. They are for use in wear housing whereupon have a lot of readers.
I still maintain that you can not track the location of someone using an RFID tag. I used to design RFID readers for a living.

Yes, I have read them and I disagree. One of the specific goals of a dense deployment like that is location tracking. If you've ever played laser tag, you've probably done so in a converted warehouse... which is what made me think of RFID for this project in the first place. Players moving around from barrier to barrier to spawn point, etc and is really no different from packages moving from receiving to storage to shipping, etc. Both uses have very similar location tracking needs.

The key to solving the interference riddle is synchronization, according to the paper that pops up most often in that google search. When properly implemented, I think RFID is very usable for this purpose.

Yes, I have read them and I disagree.

OK so you have a right to be wrong.
But flights of fancy are not helpful to a new comer. Projects that involve thousands of dollars R&D investment and multy engineering teams are not often taken up be the hobbyist.
Just in case you think I do not know what I am talking about have a look at this:-
Imgur
It is a musical sequencer made up of 32 RFID readers in close proximity. I had to design and build the readers myself. If you look at the title of this thread the OP describes himself as "the ultimate noob".

To the others interested in this project:-
Note if you are serious about locating the participants then:-
Location using zigbee is possible search for Application Note AN016 with the title:-

Locating ZigBee nodes using TI’s C2431 location engine and the Daintree Networks Sensor Network Analyzer

That way you don't have to wire up the whole infrastructure every time you want a game.

Grumpy_Mike:
OK so you have a right to be wrong.

Just because you deem this level of a project outside his scope doesn't mean it's impossible or that I'm otherwise wrong. He said:

Garbloom:
Time and money spent really aren't issues to me, but I am curious at the feasibility and relative difficulty of an IR system that includes these features

...

I want to use this project as my gateway into the programming sphere, correcting mistakes and discovering as I go.

I simply presented an option that is feasible. It may not be /practical/, or it may be exactly what he wants. I think it's better to let him decide that. He may truly be the ultimate noob, or he may be a wealthy individual with the time and money to create something truly revolutionary in his chosen realm. I thought the spirit of open source hardware was to push the limits of what is possible and create new things... you seem to want to shut him down before he even tries. Just because you tried something in the past and failed doesn't mean that this "ultimate noob" won't figure out a way to be successful in the future.

Just because you tried something in the past and failed

Can you point to what I have tried to do in the past and failed to do?
You are starting to get offensive.

Grumpy_Mike:

Just because you tried something in the past and failed

Can you point to what I have tried to do in the past and failed to do?
You are starting to get offensive.

I wasn't intending to get offensive, so I apologize. You indicated that you had worked extensively with RFID in the past and that using a dense distribution of readers was a non-starter. I (possibly incorrectly) assumed that meant that you had tried but were unable to do it. If that's not the case, then you assumed it wasn't possible... but when I pointed out that it is, in fact, possible - you said I was wrong. I drew my own conclusions about what that implied, but I don't think I was off base in my assumptions. If I was, then I apologize again. That said, saying I'm wrong and implying that your experience with RFID is somehow more relevant than that of the engineers who published those papers... that can be taken as offensive as well.

I wasn't intending to get offensive, so I apologize.

Thanks. :slight_smile:

The point being that at first tracking a location by RFID anywhere in a warehouse would require a lot of RFID readers with a range of at least up to the knee of the person waring the tag. At a reader density that would be prohibitive expensive and quite a technical challenge involving designing custom readers. Then in a later post you changed to talking about only having the readers in things some one might hide behind. This I consider not fulfilling the brief because, when being hit running between hiding places there would be no range information and second most RFID systems can't cope with more than one tag in the field at the same time. So two people or more would be rendered invisible. Now I know you can get tags that will back off if they detect a collision or you can get readers that will read multiple tags but these are even more specialised and expensive.

That said, saying I'm wrong and implying that your experience with RFID is somehow more relevant than that of the engineers who published those papers... that can be taken as offensive as well.

No that was not my intent. What I was questioning was the relevance of those papers to the problem in hand.

now that is a helpful post! :smiley:

Seeing your thought process removes the shroud of "this won't work because I say so" and IMHO contributes to the creative process.

The concept my brain came up with used barriers/obstacles and walls because in my (somewhat limited and forever ago) experience playing laser tag, most players spent most of their time in cover of some sort. It also lowered the number of readers when compared to a grid type deployment, but perhaps that's not a great idea. Either way, if the system has a last-known location for each player you can calculate shot distance to a rough accuracy. It's not perfect, but it's useful. In a grid-in-the-floor reader deployment (assuming that's possible, I don't know where he's building his arenas and if they're even permanent installations) you would get more granular location data. I still hold that RFID is a feasible option, but it may well be a bad choice given other available options.

The Zigbee idea is interesting. I skimmed the AN016 and didn't see information about location granularity, but I may have just missed it. That could prove to be a better way to accomplish this using one radio (per player) to handle location data and all other wireless communication during a match. I wonder how the accuracy of the blind nodes is affected by the varying obstacle density (players' bodies and whatever other cover is provided in the arena). It would be a really cool feature to provide a realtime arena map with locations, shots fired, hit count, etc. to spectators. You could even use it to replay matches so teams could study tactics and improve... I think I'm getting too interested in this project :smiley:

If you desire to stick with arduino and shields, I found a helpfull article about it. Just skimmed it so you have to decide for yourself if it will be of use.

https://www.google.nl/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=8&cad=rja&ved=0CFgQFjAH&url=http%3A%2F%2Fpublications.theseus.fi%2Fbitstream%2Fhandle%2F10024%2F43966%2FGutierrez_Deseada.pdf%3Fsequence%3D1&ei=2Iv8UKqvOuq40QWDqYDYDA&usg=AFQjCNENCTT9SiZrKNjNxCASg8Zi8zrWtw&bvm=bv.41248874,d.d2k

Hello

First, I am more than intrigued with this idea, and have been mulling it over in my head a bit.

I have an idea to solve the hit point system issue. This may not be feasible the way I see it, but I am throwing it out there to see if it might work.
I am just riffing of the top of my head, so if I am wrong on certain details, please correct me.
What about using real laser pointers as the laser?
Each player would have to wear glasses to protect their eyes (if they even make glasses like that, but it seems I have seen such a monster before)
for the hit sensors, What about arrays of LDRs with with a light diffuser in front of them. wouldn't the diffuser screen spread out the light beam from the laser enough to effect one zone of the LDR array, and the drop in resistance could trigger a point value to be sent through blue tooth to the shooters unit and add to his XP and level.

With an actual laser beam, you could keep the keep the area of the target affected much more precise.

I am not sure if this would work or not, but it sounded workable in my head and I figured I would throw it out there.
Hope it helps
N8

Wow! I was not anticipating this sort of support. I am extremely pleased to be a member of this community. I apologize for not actively responding, school just started up again, so time is stretched now, but just know I'm taking everything you guys have said into account and would love to work with any of the other groups who are mulling this project over. Perhaps we could supercollab, knock this out quickly and implement a number of features we all have.

In regards to measuring distance, which seems to be the most pressing hurdle, I did some research and found that while I may not be able to directly measure distance, measuring time is actually a possibility. This would involve the equipment being linked via wifi or other means, but I should be able to measure exact time of shot and time of received hit. Using the proper formula (don't have it on hand) you can potentially find the distance shot from. Measurements will obviously have to be very precise as a millisecond would be the difference between a point blank shot and a shot from the moon. Can someone confirm this as a possibility?