This is probably the first post on (hopefully) a series of ‘offtopic’ posts covering cool things I’ve done and consider worth sharing. It’s about a side project we did more than two years ago, while working on multitouch tables and IR technology. At first we incorporated a 780 nm infrared laser into a plastic MP5 soft-air toy gun. The laser perfectly fit into the barrel (Fig. 1a). Two 1.5 V batteries were placed inside the hold (Fig. 1b) and wired with a 25 V/470 µF, a switch and the laser (Fig. 2). The idea behind using a capacitor is to prevent continuous firing of the laser, most importantly as a security measure. The assembled MP5 laser gun can then be used to fire light bursts of a few milliseconds. To track the infrared light spots on a projection surface, we used a modified Hercules Classic Silver webcam. It’s a very cheap model (only 320×240 pixels) but it features a M12 lens with integrated IR filter which…