TZUUM TAKES LASER TAG INTO THE WORLD OF SMARTPHONES AND GPS
George Carter, the inventor who brought Laser Tag to the world in the 1980s is getting back in the game, so to speak, with a new augmented reality competitive combat and strategy game called Tzuum.
Launch DFW reported that Carter’s Tzuum game is in development for iOS.
Carter is the man behind the introduction in 1984 of Photon, the first version of laser tag.
TZUUM IS LASER TAG AT THE NEXT LEVEL
According to the Launch DFW report, Tzuum is the culmination of the idea he had in the ’80s. He first thought of laser tag while watching Star Wars in a theater in 1977, according to LaunchDFW.
While Photon had to be used in a controlled environment using, cumbersome equipment and the computer technology of the time, Tzuum is the next generation of laser tag and uses smartphones as its computer.
Modern smartphones have many times more computing power than the technology of the 1980s.
“It’s a completely different technology than has ever been used for laser tag,” Carter told Launch DFW. “It works on the orientation sensors and the GPS in the phone. It’s called geo-pairing, which is a concept that the military developed probably about 10 years ago.”
YOU DON’T NEED A LOT OF EQUIPMENT TO PLAY
Here’s how it works:
All you need to play is an iPhone and headset.
The system uses the GPS technology and the magnetometer in the mobile device to update each player’s location twice a second. That offers up-to-the-second accuracy of location, Launch DFW said.
Carter told the website that he is taking an audio-first approach to augmented reality, which he said is more accurate than the visual-first approach undertaken by much of the AR industry.
“The eye forgives what the ear does not,” Carter told Launch DFW. “If you can create a polished aural experience, it will cover a multitude of sins in any other part of any type of interaction in the entertainment experience.”
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