What is your beam height?

[The_Doctor]

I'm always interested in stuff with frosted glass and lasers. Just can't afford to buy it. What I did with glass showed that serious precision is needed to make it repeatable, and what's more, for best effect you need a lot of motion, pitch, yaw, roll, and translation in horizontal and vertical too, all at high resolution. If you can do all those you'll have some very powerful warping, morphing effects, and if you can store the co-ordinates, the possibility to find forms and recall them at will later. I found some truly amazing glass phantoms, but had to settle for photographing stills and false-colouring them to get them to look nice and laser-like onscreen. It worked well but if I could have animated the appearance of those phantasms from a stored sequence of moves, the effect would have been high on the spooky scale, right up there with Twilight Zone and X-Files. You have to be very patient to hunt for the right angles, and it depends on HUGE amounts of luck too, and an apparatus to give control to match a digital system would be an awesome way to make it easy and repeatable.

In short, I suggest that if you're serious about this, go all the way. Otherwise all you'll have a is a simple lumia. If you give it fully robot-like degrees of control, it will be a very powerful method, and truly unique, it will NOT be something software will emulate. Not until someone builds something to emulate, at the least. Maybe it could be modelled but it would take a strong system, and it would never have the iridescence of a laser even then, so you have picked a good target to aim for.

[mikkojay]

Lumia effects are great- what are you thinking about making?
Sounds really cool to me!
-Mike

[chad]

Well It looks like FourDee wins the bottom with 20mm. And Steve takes the top prize with 3.25".

Dr. That would be in the specials category. Mechanically it would not be too bad, control wouldn't be to awful either. But making it affordable would be tough.

mikkojay: If you have ever seen a actual Laserium show then you know what I am thinking.

If not: I would like to build a module that has 6 or 8 different lumia, diffraction, fuz, and specials ( i really can't describe them) outputs that you could use with your main scanner set. They would be controlled by either simple switches or dmx. I am also thinking about doing simple color control (dicro flag) for the box. Basically I want to reproduce a laserium system using modern stuff and making it as cheap as possable.

I don't know just feeling nastalgic and started thing about what can be done now on a super budget.

chad

[chad]

Ok next question.

What side do your scanners have for an input beam?

If you are standing in front of your projector, facing it, is the scanner input on the left or right?

Mine are on the right.

chad

[allthatwhichis]

I did not measure; looks like you have enough... My beams enter my scanners from the left so they hit the top scanner first and bounce down; any overspray goes into the scanner block, not up, into what ever is ther or whom ever happens to be looking down at the projecotr if it is open. this is also how my enclosure was set up when I bought it...

[mixedgas]

if my projector outputs are facing the audience, and I'm standing behind the projector, facing the audience, lasers are on my left, scan head is the last thing down the rail at the right.

Steve