Hi all,
Back in 2008 I worked on a variety of different pieces of laser display software for Mac OS. One of my favorites was a drawing app, that let you draw with the laser using a graphics tablet:
I also wrote an iTunes visualizer plugin to draw abstract pictures that interpreted the audio samples being played back, and worked with some other folks to build a module-based laser show app. It could import Adobe Flash animations, read and write ILDA files, and draw some basic lissajous figures.
Digging back into this stuff this week, I found it wasn't hard to recompile the drivers I had written and the test programs to play .ild files. The driver test app draws a simple rotating torus wireframe animation. It all seemed to work without too much hacking!
I cobbled together some vintage Catweazle scanners, the EasyLase DAC, and a home-brew 405nm laser pointer I had laying about and managed to capture this:
Anyway, excited to be writing laser show software again, even if the first little bits aren't terribly impressive. Who else is writing their own show software? What are the major guiding principles you've adopted in designing the user interface?