You're at a track and field meet. And just about the time your getting bored, they announce a special race for supermarket checkers. People from Wal Mart, Target, And a dozen other companies are lining up.

There are black globes set up in sequence on both sides of the track at about shoulder height. If you were to walk from globe to globe you would do so in a zigzag pattern. And this is what all the checkers start to do. At each globe they walk up, read a bar code placed randomly on the globe with their handheld gun, and walk on to the next. After reading all 20 globes they down load their guns at the judges station and get a ok to race sticker.

Then the starters pistol sounds and heats of 2 or 4 checkers run down the course zigging an zagging going for the next globe as soon as their gun tells them they got a good scan. Sometimes they have to run behind a globe to get a hit, other times a shooters stance only half way there gets the hit.

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The races would go to fastest runner, but also the crippled old checker with super plus technology.

(or Put Bar codes on the other checkers and your in paintball land without the mess.)
-- popbottle, Feb 28 2015

Totally not what I was expecting.
Use a high-res high-speed camera. Sprint past all globes, use software to analyse images and extract barcode data (assuming you can't see all of the barcodes from the starting line).
-- neutrinos_shadow, Mar 01 2015



random, halfbakery