The world of gaming has indeed changed and evolved to a great extent. From playing games from CDs to creating your own game is itself a great achievement by the technological partners in this industry. Skirmos is an advanced and popular open source laser tag system that allows the player to create his own world in gaming. It allows the player to develop his or her own battlefield. The player can easily customize games as per one’s requirement. Skirmos can be used for any game. The player can play indoor as well as in outdoors with the help of Skirmos.
Skirmos gives a real and a visual experience to the players. The laser tag system works with the help of a gun mount LCD display, open source programming and a radio based dynamic scoring giving a shooting experience to the player. The USP of the gun is its in-built colored LCD screen. The screen of Skirmos display a range of necessary information for Health, Kills, deaths, Ammo, Team people, Game timing, objective, instructions and other desired information for playing. This information can be feeded in advance which helps the team members in communicating well. Richard Rice, co- founder as well as software designer of Skirmos said, “If somebody gets killed, somebody takes the flag or the score changes, it will update live on screen, meaning that the radio keeps all the scoring and game events automatically updated, just as they are when playing a game on the internet.” Skirmos has tried to make the gaming experience as much realistic as possible.
The laser tag game play is the latest target in Skirmos. Although the market has laser tag game and other equipments available yet Skirmos is planning for the latest and most advanced laser tag game playing experience. Allen Ivanoviv, the hardware designer and co-founder of Skirmos revealed, “We were always on Xbox Live playing Call of Duty or Halo, and we also played Airsoft a lot, But if you want to play a video game in real life, the laser tag systems that exist are of very limited functionality. We wanted to take the things that happen in video games and combine them with the core functionality of laser tag, expanding it to create a huge open-source game system.”
The player can make alterations to the software of Skirmos system in which various changes can be done in existing games. The player can change weapon option, objectives, obstacles in battle field, changes in game levels, etc… Rice said, “You can go into Arduino and write your own software, or you can download games that others have created from the internet. This we hope will add to the longevity of the product.”
The LCD gun of Skirmos is the greatest attraction point. The shooting range of gun is over 500 ft. The Gun has a transparent shell which can change the colors from inside which brings novelty while gaming. The gun has an in-built sound card. Ibrahim Pasha, co-founder of Skirmos said, “You can take regular WAV or MP3 files and upload them through the gun’s SD card slots, this allows you to give the gunfire different sounds, so your gun could sound like it is from Star Wars or it could sound like an AK47. The sound card also adds to the game experience in that it allows game play announcements, for example an alert when your team’s flag has been taken.”