Artisitic input idea

[Doc]

I don't know if this has been done before, or if it's even feesible.

My idea was to use a touch screen controller like a sketch pad i.e. wherever you place a finger; you get a pencil beam in the corresponding X/Y position for some seconds or until the maximum set amount of points are reached. Throw in some conditions like; keeping your fingers in contact with the screen gives you an anchor point with a line conecting to the next nearest point. Add some selectable options around the perimeter of the screen for colour and beam behavior i.e. scrolling colour, X or Y relative poistion or maybe beat detector control. Maybe add the ability to give the beams inertia to the point that they leave the projectable area.

I think if this was doable; it would give you the ability to play the laser like a musical instrument?

Other than a bit of PHP and CSS; I am no code man, so I'm asking you guys that are

[shrad]

I'd suggest something like the modern touchpads

they have big resolution, and are pressure sensitive and multipoint

I saw last time the demo program of a DELL laptop, and it gave a bitmap image of pressure in the pad in realtime

I don't know if there's a development toolset or an API to control these, but is must be doable

[mikkojay]

Pangolin's LD2000 SDK comes with a quick sample program in C++ called "follow the mouse" that serves as a sample tutorial of how to interact with the SDK. It is a short running command window app, but the concept is not too far off from what you describe.
I think this is a great idea and I would be happy to look into it in the future as time permits (the big catch)
-Mike

[imobscure]

I don't know if this has been done before, or if it's even feesible.

My idea was to use a touch screen controller like a sketch pad i.e. wherever you place a finger; you get a pencil beam in the corresponding X/Y position for some seconds or until the maximum set amount of points are reached. Throw in some conditions like; keeping your fingers in contact with the screen gives you an anchor point with a line conecting to the next nearest point. Add some selectable options around the perimeter of the screen for colour and beam behavior i.e. scrolling colour, X or Y relative poistion or maybe beat detector control. Maybe add the ability to give the beams inertia to the point that they leave the projectable area.

I think if this was doable; it would give you the ability to play the laser like a musical instrument?

Other than a bit of PHP and CSS; I am no code man, so I'm asking you guys that are

Back in the day there were joysticks - Now I don't mean those pathetic things that came with video games. These were bullet proof and had about a four inch throw. There were three modes, 1 where the RYGB images followed the joystick position, 2 where the images were at the four points of the compass all moving in the same direction as the joystick, and 3 where 2 were 180 degrees apart and went the same direction as the joystick and two mirrored. Joysticks were fun. Throw in a gain pot, individual overrides, adjustable damping and well hell there was a number called Tank in Laserium I that was nothing but joystick three scan glasses and some chopper. Oh and they were soooo handy for z axis image rotation - BTW they're easy to make... And if you threw in an A/D or two and some computing power and you might just...

[Pangolin]

I don't know if this has been done before, or if it's even feesible.

My idea was to use a touch screen controller like a sketch pad i.e. wherever you place a finger; you get a pencil beam in the corresponding X/Y position for some seconds or until the maximum set amount of points are reached. Throw in some conditions like; keeping your fingers in contact with the screen gives you an anchor point with a line conecting to the next nearest point. Add some selectable options around the perimeter of the screen for colour and beam behavior i.e. scrolling colour, X or Y relative poistion or maybe beat detector control. Maybe add the ability to give the beams inertia to the point that they leave the projectable area.

I think if this was doable; it would give you the ability to play the laser like a musical instrument?

Other than a bit of PHP and CSS; I am no code man, so I'm asking you guys that are

Yes, this has been done before, perhaps started 25 years ago by AVI. There are ways of doing this using our software, and without even needing a touch screen or pad. If you take a look at the "Headed for the future" and "Time show" shows, you will see some of this. I am sure there are other shows in the Pangolin library that use this as well.

Bill