Lazer Tag Team Ops "Deluxe" Prototypes
Click here for IRT-2X "Drone" prototypes
Click here for Master Blaster prototypes
Early Test Beds:
The earliest LTTO Prototype was the "Golf Ball Finder," which consisted of two parts. The first was a processor which generated an identifiable IR signature which it used to light up a little plastic golf ball from the inside, making it glow like a small explosion when viewed in the Infra-Red spectrum. The second part was another processor, hooked to multiple receivers behind lenses, which would determine which of the receivers was or was not seeing the glowing golf ball, and would output a pattern of LED's to indicate whether the golf ball was to the left, to the right, straight ahead, or not seen. We used a golf ball in order to diffuse the IR light from the IR-LED, in the hopes that we could have a single IR-LED produce a signature that could be sensed from all directions. Unfortunately, the limitations of the receivers we were using meant that we couldn't make this work at any significant distance, so we ultimately changed it so that we had four IR-LED's lighting up the golf ball.
Nothing remains of the original circuit boards used for this concept demonstrator, but the golf ball itself and the triple-receiver are treasured parts of my "Lazer Tag Museum." You can still see how the golf ball is built with both a single IR-LED poking up the middle as well as the four IR-LED's in a ring around the base:
(Do you like the peep sight made from a pair of capacitors? I think it adds a certain indescribable something... "redneckedness" perhaps??? lol)
That system proved out the basic concept that we could tell WHEN we were pointing at another unit, even from far away, and also by implication meant that by changing the IR signature transmitted through the golf ball, we'd be able to tell IF we landed a hit on the remote unit.
The next step was to integrate all of this together. We moved to a dual-processor board with one processor handling all IR generation and receiving while the other processor handled all sound effects, user interface, and game play. Eventually we eliminated the left-or-right sensing and concentrated just on "target centered" (to reduce the cost of the system). We also eventually eliminated the golf ball when we found that a horizontal ring of IR-LED's shining outwards did a better job than a bunch of them shining up into a diffuser (the golf ball). During this phase of development, we were using 6 IR-LED's in the dome rather than the 4 we used in production. Here is the final form of that prototype:
Using this prototype, we were able to fully prove the basic closed-loop-communications concept of what would become LTTO. We generated regular beacons from one unit, the second unit would lock-on to these beacons and could fire at the first unit, and if the first unit took a hit then it would modify the next beacon signature to indicate that it had been hit. If the firing unit saw this change in the beacon signature, it knew that the tag it just fired had landed.
True LTTO "Deluxe" Model Prototypes:
Having come this far, it occured to me that once we had closed-loop communications working, we had the fundamentals of an online multiplayer video game. My bosses gave me "carte blanche" to get as creative with the new platform as I could imagine, and I did so with joy! I soon progressed past what the dual-processor board could do for me, both in game play complexity and in the ability to display all of the information that was being developed. We moved to a more powerfull CPU that could directly drive a custom LCD, and began developing games and interfaces that were very heavily reliant on this display. Here are the prototypes we built at STM and used for this phase of the development:
Using 6 of these, I was able to complete the code and gameplay, and test all of the various Hosting/Joining/Debriefing processes. But to make sure that everything would continue to work under worst-case conditions, we had HFE (Hasbro Far East, Hasbro's manufacturing arm in China) make 24 more platforms for us to load the code into and test that everything went well:
It's a good thing we had them do this, too! As it turns out there were still some bugs in the communications protocol, as well as a problem with taking false hits from the beacons of nearby units when too many were clustered together in one place. A few software changes later, we had it in the bag and were ready to move into the production phase.
Lots of little pieces and assemblies and whatnot went back and forth, none of which I still have so I sadly can't post any pictures of them. But eventually the molds were done, and the first sample plastic came back:
Shortly after the black ones were made, the first mask-programmed processor chips came in from the IC factory. These chips contained an early version of the code called "TC09" (Test Code version 0.9) which was mostly functional except for debriefing, but it was not signals-compatible with the production code. These chips were assembled to functional production circuit boards, and installed in some groomed plastic bodies which had been painted silver at the factory:
Black and silver are not acceptable toy-gun colors for safety reasons by the way, so please do not paint any production units these colors!
Production:
After some minor debugging of the circuitry and tweaking of the molds, we went into production in roughly April of 2004. By the end of June, the first units were appearing on Wal-Mart's website, and by early July they were appearing on the shelves.
The rest, as they say, is history (Lazer Tag Hstory, that is)!
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