You, too, can be foiled by lasers while trying to steal a diamond

It’s a well-worn trope in heist movies: the array of lasers surrounding a diamond — or the Fabergé Coronation Egg — in the middle of a museum gallery, the beams crisscrossing at odd angles, ready to sound an alarm if a thief inadvertently breaks one of them.

You won’t often find such arrays in real-life museums; if Catherine Zeta-Jones can outfox a security system while blindfolded it’s probably not the most effective means of protecting your valuables. But that doesn’t stop people from wanting to maneuver laser-filled rooms themselves, to test their mettle as would-be burglars.

That’s what the folks at Nerdworking are betting on, anyway. The company has built a “laser playground” at its headquarters in Instanbul, a 7.3 x 2.5 x 2.5-m room filled with an array of 200-mW green lasers. Here, players navigate the room, trying to reach a “precious goal” at the end within three minutes. But if they touch any of the beams an alarm sounds (and, importantly, the lasers immediately shut down).

And the Nerdworking staff aren’t the only ones to develop such a thing. The good people at Bopping Heads offer a “Mission Impassable Laser Maze,” for example, in either a mobile unit or a permanent installation.

All of which is excellent news for the rest of us. I mean, we’ve all dreamed of reenacting scenes from Tenacious D: The Pick of Destiny. Now, thanks to Nerdworking, Bopping Heads and others, we can.

>