hardware | software

hardware | software

Rigging Lasers

Attaching lasers to the seats in the Earth Theater is a complicated process. It is important to remember why we're going to all the trouble of rigging them:

Lasers can be stolen, so we need a way to bind them to the chairs.
We want control over when the lasers are on or off.
- We can turn them off at will in case of a security hazard.
- We prevent people from shining the lasers whenever they want.
  We only turn them on when the dinosaur skeleton is on the center screen, the screen which is tracked by the computer.
We do not want all 62 lasers on the screen at once. Therefore we defined 4 groups of 15 lasers, each represented by a color (green, purple, yellow and blue). Only one of those groups would be on during a given interaction.
To achieve this, we use Coolneon, electro-luminescent wire which we thread inside clear tubes on each seat. The computer controls when the coolneon and the lasers are on, indicating to that group that it is their turn.

That said, how do you go about turning a $2 battery operated laser pointer into an interactive extensible input device? In roughly five steps:

Step 1 involves the generic laser pointer we all know and love. Simple pull out it's insides and you get:

Step 2 involves soldering wires to the laser diode.

Step 3 involves taking those wires, and combining them with wires soldered to cool neon.

Step 4 involves shoving all those wires and cool neon into two lengths of tubing, one clear, one black.

Step 5 involves soldering a stereo 1/8" plug to the bottom of the wires and putting it inside the black tube.

The final result is a self contained laser/coolneon hybrid that can be swapped in and out of the extensible hardware base installed in the theater itself. Let's take a moment and talk about that extensible hardware base.

Here you see the black PVC pipe running along the base of the seats in the Earth Theater. Also, you see the laser tube, or BioBeam attached to the seat structure.

Here is a close-up of the BioBeam's plug about to be integrated with the extensible hardware base.

Here is a the final result as seen in the theater itself:

Below are four diagrams used during the main production night of BioBeams when a hardy army of dedicated volunteers gave up their Friday night to help us construct them and lay the extensible hardware base.

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to contact Shawn Patton.

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