No vests. No referees. Your phone confirms every hit — so nobody argues the call.
An electronic camera game. Provisional patents filed in the US & Canada.
Early access and drop alerts when pre-order opens. No spam.
Everyone's lived it — backyard blasters, home laser tag, driveway Nerf wars. No one can prove who got hit, so it ends in an argument. And every alternative makes you compromise:
Why now: every phone is a camera + screen that supports advanced computer vision. On-device, it can finally confirm a hit on a person — with nothing worn by the target.
Turn on your TRACER and connect it to your iPhone. Personal Hotspot carries the shot. The other player doesn’t wear anything.
The muzzle camera is looking where you point. Backyard, driveway, park — if you can see them, you’re in the arena.
Trigger, capture, on-device vision. Hit or miss shows on your phone. Nobody gets to argue the call.
Safety: TRACER is an electronic camera game. It is not a firearm, airsoft marker, or projectile launcher.
Founders Edition pricing goes to the waitlist first — you’ll get the number when pre-order opens. No fake MSRP on this page.
Andy Sworyk created TRACER, an AI camera laser tag blaster with on-device hit detection. Solo, self-taught, with no engineering team or outside funding, he built six hardware versions, the firmware, and the iOS app in four months.
Product design, enclosure, embedded hardware, firmware, Apple Vision integration, UX, field testing, and provisional patents — all in-house.
A multidisciplinary founder who turns capital into working product.
The proof of concept. An ESP32-CAM and muzzle camera running the full loop — trigger, capture, Apple Vision, hit or miss. The printed shell was dremelled out by hand to fit the parts, no designed cavities yet. Sealed shut with a known one-behind capture bug still in it. Seventeen days from first circuit to working system.
The trust pass. Fixed the one-behind bug with a firmware buffer flush read from the frame logs, added the audio system and a laser, rebuilt the iOS app. Shell still hand-dremelled to fit the parts. Every shot now fresh and correct.
The platform rebuild. New processor, 5MP autofocus camera, and a move to WiFi — plus an interior designed around the components: custom cradles instead of a hand-dremelled shell. The end of the dremel era. US and Canadian patents filed in this window.
The identity. An original pistol platform designed in CAD from scratch, replacing the borrowed silhouette. Where TRACER stopped looking like an existing firearm and became its own product.
The integration. Real haptic recoil, an animated LED strip on a custom diffuser channel, and true battery reporting, all brought onto the new platform at once. Firmware grew to match — I2C haptics, FastLED states, a shared sensor bus. Rough and open-shelled, to prove the whole stack runs. It did.
The clean build. Full board bring-up: haptic auto-calibration, a fuel gauge fixed after a months-long bug, the complete BLE-to-WiFi handoff with gameplay over UDP. Firmware past 3,000 lines. Routed, closed, field-tested — the basis for the 25-unit fleet.
Six iterations in under four months — from zero electronics experience to a field-tested fleet.
~$8B global recreational-shooting market, growing 7–9% a year.
No. TRACER is an electronic camera game in a pistol-shaped shell. No projectile, no powder, no CO2. Built so the backyard can be the arena — not so it reads as a firearm on a feed.
It’s aimed at families who’ve outgrown Nerf. An adult should set up the iPhone hotspot. We don’t publish an age rating yet — treat it like any screen-plus-hardware game and supervise younger players.
Both, in normal lighting. The muzzle camera needs to see the person you’re aiming at. Pitch-black rooms and harsh backlight are the hard cases we’re still tuning.
Yes for now. The gun joins your iPhone’s Personal Hotspot; hit detection runs on-device. Android is not in this generation.
Field-tested past 100 feet on moving targets. That’s backyard-to-park distance, not a 3-gun bay.
No impact round. Hits are confirmed on the phone. Use it responsibly, and don’t carry or modify it in a way that could make it look like a real firearm.
Questions, press, investors — it goes to the inbox. Waitlist is up top if you just want drop alerts.
