Realtime laser graphics

Wow, that is awesome! We played around with this back in ~1990 with the sound outputs on an Amiga driving a set of slaughtered speakers with little mirrors attached. We did nothing nearly as advanced, just played with sine wave outputs synced to music, but the limiting factor there was definitely the hardware. If you tried to make hard turns with our setup, it would just make huge amounts of noise and quickly fall apart.

I wish he would write more about what hardware he's using to do this. These days I guess you can use some sort of MEMS device that would give you way higher output bandwidth. And now when you can buy 1-watt lasers for a few hundred bucks, you could really do something that only Jean-Michel Jarre could have done back in those days...

Speaking of DIY/open laser dacs, one of my friends built one called the ether-dream. (http://ether-dream.com/) You can control it over ethernet and all of the firmware is on github.

I put together a simple AVR based laser system once that projects a UV laser onto a glow in the dark surface. Check out at http://lm741.posterous.com/ if you're curious.

Description of the actual hardware laser scanner used http://marcansoft.com/blog/openlase/hardware-mark-1/

Hector Martín (marcan, @marcan42) could be the next Fabrice Bellard. He has an incredible potential.

Robin Fox's work with lasers is quite incredible "synchronous sound and light information": http://robinfox.net/projects/laser/