Bangalore-based Laser Republic creates real life experience leveraging laser tag equipment
With urbanization and lack of playgrounds, children’s physical activity has significantly come down. To add to the woes, the digital world further encourages us to be couch potatoes even when we are playing an action game.
There is still a dearth of entertainment options for friends, family or team outing. “In the US, kids’ parties are activity oriented, and we thought it would be great to have gaming experience like Laser Tag come to India. However, there was a significant improvement possible in terms of game plays and experience and hence the opportunity unfolded,” says Navjeet, Co-founder of Laser Republic.
Laser Republic manufactures gaming and entertainment products like Laser Tag that provides engaging real life experiences and creates business opportunities to provide the new gen with gaming and entertainment services. “We are the pioneers of making laser tag equipment in India and have the largest number of deployments in the country,” adds Navjeet.
The startup organizes multiple birthday parties on the weekends and corporate parties on the weekdays. “With corporate parties we organize competitions to determine the winning team,” says Navjeet.
“ As of now there are seven laser tag centers which are using our equipment. There are many more in the pipeline as business is fast revenue generating, and is based on a novel concept plus there is a huge market opportunity,” adds Navjeet.
Moving forward, the company plans to make mobile setups, activate deployments in theme parks and continuously improve the playing experience.
Experience of running product as well as service based startup at the same time
“Our primary design goal is to significantly improve the playing experience with our equipment. The challenge was to continuously evolve and deliver value to our customers,” says Navjeet. With its extensible design, the startup now has ability to roll out new game scenarios in a very short time period so that the end customers always have some new scenario to play when they visit the laser tag center.
Secondly, the challenge was to manage the development of the end-to-end stack as Laser Republic’s own the complete hardware design (mechanical and electronic), firmware and software.
Besides the above, the other challenge was to optimize its process for scale and being able to deliver the equipment is a short time to customers. “With a modular design and composable architecture, we are able to get a complete laser tag business started for a customer in a matter of five weeks,” adds Navjeet.
Major features
“The phasors are true to life and provide a great playing experience. They give force feedback and sound when you shoot, and light up while playing the game. The phasor is activated only when you hold it with both hands,” says Navjeet.
“The bright lights on the jackets can differentiate colors enabling as many as seven teams to play in a game. The technology used enables high performance on the chip and communication to provide best playing experience with more than 10 gaming scenarios,” adds Navjeet.
