Inventor turns his laser tag game into anywhere, anytime iPhone sport

DALLAS – George Carter III, the Dallas inventor who brought the world laser tag 32 years ago, wants to bring the still-popular game into the 21st century.

The 71-year-old entrepreneur has developed an app that allows combatants to play virtual shoot-em-up anytime, anywhere using iPhones and earbuds as the gun, map, scoring system and communication tool.

"You don't need to go to a paintball or laser tag center," said Carter, founder of Tactical Entertainment. "You can quickly gather a group of friends through social media and play. We're also going to find ways for meetups to happen."

Carter has named his laser-tag sequel Tzuum — pronounced zoom — as a tribute to Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese general, philosopher and author of "The Art of War."

"We're trying to make this game very tactical and strategic," Carter said. "He's the guy universally known for that."

Krasamo, an app-development company based in the Dallas area, has been working on the project for two years.

Beta testing was, as of press time, slated to begin soon.

The idea stems from a military project that Carter has been working on for eight years. He has three U.S. patents for systems that create live simulation training for soldiers using common digital camera optics mounted on actual combat rifles that shoot blanks. Smart devices and computers keep score.

When the military proved slow on the draw to buy his innovations, Carter switched his focus to a platform for games two years ago. He's used his military patents as steppingstones for a fourth patent and one that's pending that protect key aspects of the game. He's kicked in those two patents and $100,000 to get Tzuum up and running.

"I'm all in on this one," he said.

So are friends and friends of friends, who have invested more than $700,000 thus far.

When Richard Osteen, a 61-year-old tax consultant and former neighbor, learned that Carter had shifted gears, he asked if he could invest.

"My high points are that it's an outdoor game that can be played in teams, and it does require some strategy like all good games do," Osteen said. "And it's an opportunity to get kids back outside and away from audiovisual and electronic games."

Does Osteen expect to make gazillions with this?

"I don't know," he said. "I'm really excited about the variety of games that can use this platform. It's only limited by our imagination. It doesn't have to be a shooting thing. It could be more of a hide-and-seek or capture-the-flag type of game."

Carter sees his competition as mainly outdoor laser tag games that use screen-based technology — which can be problematic in sunlight — or are smartphone based but require additional hardware to shoot an infrared beam.

Both types of systems usually require vests with sensors to score hits, he said.

Carter is figuring out who his market is.

"My experience with laser tag showed that only about 15 percent of the players really get into it as their main form of entertainment. Everybody else is a casual user. They play it once a year at a birthday party or they get exposed to it at some sort of team-building event.

"We're trying to determine who that 15 percent is going to be.

"So far, it comes down to young adults, mostly male and college age," he said. "But we think we're going to get a more female audience than laser tag, airsoft, paintball or other combat games. It's just a phone, and you don't have to wear a sweaty vest that someone else just wore."

Carter hopes to make money by selling virtual goods — like fantasy drones for missile airstrikes — and more sophisticated versions.

"I actually shot one of our early code developers who was in the Netherlands from a park [near Dallas]," Carter said. "It was more of a gimmick. We wanted to test whether we could do it, and we did."

One optional piece of gear will be a pistol-grip case your iPhone fits in. It doesn't add any software features, he said, just makes the phone easier to aim.

Players hear more than 30 types of battlefield sounds through a 3-D audio effects while playing.

"The first few times I played it with the sound effects, and I'd hear a helicopter, I'd look up thinking it was a real one."

Each player's location is updated in real time using GPS and geo-pairing capabilities, Carter said. "Geo-pairing means I know where you are and you know where I am, therefore we can shoot at each other."