Cool futuristic "video game" or tragedy waiting to happen?

[ScooterSissy]

Easy way to break your phone. Virtual Reality is growing by leaps and bounds, even then it might just be the next in home 3d, by that i mean useless tech that everyone has for some reason but no one uses. Augmented reality is still decades away

Guess I disagree a little. I have two augmented apps that I use often. Street Lens allows me to hold the phone up and look down the street and see restaurants and shops in the area, and Sky Map lets me hold the phone up to the sky and label astronomy interests (constellations, planets, etc - but no UFOs - yet).

Not super wide spread, and very limited uses, but it's here.

[C-dub]

Sorry, looks pretty cool to me. And looks a LOT more like people taking pictures than using a gun.

A lot of things are cool until someone dies.

I've seen people take pictures for years, and have yet to hear of someone dying from it.

I think the idea that this may be mistaken for a gun is heightened by us knowing what they're doing, and seeing their screen. Observers (including police) won't see that. They'll see kids (and maybe some adults) taking pictures of each other.

Maybe they should paint the lens device bright orange...

The problem I see with this isn't so much what they are doing, but it is the behavior, at least in this example. They way they move in a stalking manner. I trained protection dogs for many years and one of the first things they are trained to pick up on is body language. I believe LEOs are trained and become familiar with similar clues about behavior. It makes them suspicious. And then there's also the training that a recent blogger and a couple others have recently gone through in shoot-no shoot scenarios where that decision is sometimes made in fractions of a second. There was even a link around here somewhere to a simple online version of this.

[jimlongley]

I think we did this before in the '80's.....

(WARNING: NSFW d/t language & gestures)

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.....and it was as felony stupid then as it is now.

Yup - "Gotcha" which I referred to above.

I left out that the kid who got drawn on by the capital cop had popped out from behind a column on the NY State Capital, with the paintball gun pointed at the cop.

[Fangs]

Looks like Ingress with PvP

[n5wd]

It looks more like a camera than a gun, but running around concentrating on it instead of what's going on around got a couple of people in the video terminated, and could lead to something similar in real life.

Right after Anthony Edwards did "Gotcha" in 1985 it became kind of a cult thing to have "street" paintball, and we had more than one traffic incident where kids were concentrating on their opponent almost to the exclusion of everything else, and once a NY State Capital Police officer drew on a kid who came out from behind a column pointing a gun. The cop was a friend of mine and remained shaken by the incident even though he recognized (eventually) the gun to be an airgun and did not pull the trigger, but he was "that close."

The ergonomics of the "camera gun" are much different than a real pistol/airgun/paintball/BB (who holds a paintball gun up to their face to look down the sights to aim and shoot, after all) but... it seems to me that we're living in an age where more and more younger law enforcement types seem to be moving into the age of "shoot first no matter what", and that might just get some FPS gamer hurt when he/she is playing around where they really had no business being in the first place. For instance, playing around on the grounds of the NY State Capitol, or other sensitive areas.