On Thu, 8 Mar 2007, der Mouse wrote:
Somehow I got
subscribed to an optics catalog. This got me to
thinking. How hard would it be to cause a laser beam to sweep with
the speed and accuracy to be a substitute for a CRT?
Quite easy. Barcode scanners do it regularly in one dimension; you
just need to add another, much slower, scan in the other dimension....
Mount a prism horizontal and perpendicular to the target in a gizmo that
"rolls" the prism. How hard would the timing on that be?
Does anyone know of any electrically controlled
optical deflection
technology that has sub-microsecond reaction times? I seem to recall
seeing that some crystals change their refractive index with applied
voltage; if I'm not misremembering, and if they change fast enough,
that might do.
I think I saw something like that in the catalog.
I'd actually prefer to use such a thing not as a
raster display, but as
a vector display - hence the interest in electrically deflecting the
beam. I'd like to play vector videogames on a big white wall - either
classic games under something like MAME, or my own....
Yes, I'm interested in doing that too. There's a guy who came up with a
fork of MAME and some hardware for doing this. It was called "Laser
MAME". I don't know what its status is now.
Projecting
raster images on the side of a building would be fun too.
But you'd need to crank the laser intensity way up. Even then it might
not be usable except at night. :)
Using such a thing in daylight would be rather pointless. It definitely
would be usable at night. Think about laser shows.
--
David Griffith
dgriffi at
cs.csubak.edu
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