Waterloo Labs has finally invented every first person shooter fan’s wet dream; the ability to use a real gun to shoot onscreen targets. To make it happen, four accelerometers, which can be used to triangulate a point of impact based on vibrations, were mounted onto a large piece of drywall, which in turn had a flash game based on Half-Life projected onto it. The accelerometers were connected to a data acquisition device which posted the data on LabVIEW, a program that used the data from the accelerometers to determine the bullet’s point of impact. The computer then then simulated a mouse click on the point of impact. The result was that a real bullet killed a virtual enemy. Such mashups are fairly easy if you have access to a few pieces of specialized hardware and could be constructed given adequate time.