Laser Kites

For my undergrad mechanical engineering capstone project, I co-led and worked with a team of 19 fellow undergrads to create Laser Kites: a toy that combines laser tag and kite flying.

Laser Kites is a laser-tag game between two players: a kite flyer, and a laser-gun wielder. Once the kite has been hit enough times with the laser-gun, it falls out of the sky.

Within the course of a semester, we worked to ideate and make a working alpha prototype of a new product - going from ideation to user research, prototyping, and creating a working system. It was incredibly rewarding to work with kids, land on a product definition that got them excited to play laser kites, and see them having fun with the final product!

For my role on the team, I:

Coordinated product unity and timelines. As system integrator, I maintained overall timeline for the project in order to meet milestones. To do so, I coordinated among the many subteams that comprised Laser Kites. There were many systems: kite fabrication, electronics, optics, release mechanism, and laser-gun design. I worked to facilitate communication across the team, to understand cross-functional checkpoints, to unify the product vision, and to make sure different teams were on the same page.

Prototyped the kite release system. I also worked on a group of students to develop the release system that would destabilize the kite on command. We aimed for our release mechanism to be easy for kids to reset after activation, so that repeated gameplay was easy to set up. To this end, we designed a spring-loaded hair trigger that would stay shut under the large amount of string tension during kite flying, but could release by a small additional actuation force. To bring the kite back to a flyable state, children have to take just one simple motion: stick a peg on the kite string back into the spring-loaded slot, and the kite is ready to fly again. I worked on proof-of-concepts that identified the trigger's critical dimensions and material friction factors.