If you have born during 1980-1990 then you must have came across those TV gaming consoles. does MEDIA n SEGA ring a bell ???
With the beginning of holidays each year we all used to plug the console in TV and play (mario,road fighter,islander,kungfu,spartan,contra etc) for hours; among these were games like DUCK HUNT n WILD GUNMAN that uses a GUN attached to the console to play. we point the gun at the target on screen and shoot and if we aim right then the duck gets shot.
the fact that we point a gun at the tv screen and shoot and it actually works appeared quite impressive and fascinating to me. I wondered how it can work( i actually opened my video game`s gun) but could not understand anything. and as children are carefree so was i and with some time the desire to know what was the thing behind the GUN vanished.
Few days back i bought an emulator(ROCKnes), which emulates .nes files for pc . the games that we played on TV game consoles are mostly in .nes format and ROCKnes emulates these games so we can play them on computer.
In the game list emulated by ROCKnes was the game "DUCK HUNT" , i tried to play that but couldnt. then i realised that i am missing the MAGICAL gun that used to be there. Then all those memories , that fascination of the technology behind the GUN became fresh and as time has changed i could think more closely to the technology behind the equipment rather than being fascinated by it and believing some kind of miracle or magic behind it.
I thought for few days, tried to answer it with abstractness but was not able to decipher "how can the TV detect where the gun is pointed , there is no sensors or no device reading the TV screen , screen is being just used as an output device so how can it take input.. "
Then i thought is it other way round? i.e. the gun is not shooting at TV the TV is shooting at gun.
" i re ran the game in my pc and noticed that in the games that uses GUN , the item which is the target stands out completely from the background, be it the DUCK HUNT where the background is sky blue and duck being in complete contrast with all the other colours on screen ; or be it the game CLAY SHOOT where the background is sky blue and the target pure white"
so i thought is it like the gun detects the correctness of aim by detecting the colour of duck or clay ??
then i remembered that the gun that i opened contained some lenses.
this gave a direction to my thought process, i realised yes it can be possible what most of us believe that "gun shoots the tv is wrong and the TV is shooting the gun is actually right" ; "change in colour , detection of a particular colour by gun and the with the press of the trigger inputting the detected colour to the console and matching the detected and the correct colour and scoring on those basis"
yea this could be true.. it make sense. that was what i was thinking a day back..
then with some cross questions in mind , i decided to check for it on GOOGLE and found out that i was right
check this http://www.howstuffworks.com/question273.htm
As a science student I have been learning about photodiodes since past 4-5 years , i did learn what they are how they work etc. but this kind off application , using a photodiode at a press of trigger to shoot a duck on TV screen , never thought of it ..BUT someone did , and that`s why we enjoyed our childhood playing those gun shoot games that amused us, made us entertain, make us feel a great shooter when we killed 10/10 ducks (in reality not killing any) and lead most of us to think about HOW IT WORKS..
Respect to those of invented the LIGHT GUN which we know as the gaming gun and hope the mystery is no more a mystery now.
