Ars Electronica Festival 2014 - Lasergame

Prototype installation for an upcoming Ars Electronica Solutions project, the Lasergame was running at the Future Playground of the Ars Electronica Festival 2014. The aim was to reach and hit the buzzer that was located on one end of the room, without hitting the laser beams, at the fastest possible time. Since this was really a barebone prototype it was really pure fun hacking it together over the course of two weeks. It was also a good chance to test new technologies and see how everything fits together. The setup consisted of 10 small laser diodes , 10 photo resistors, 10 mirrors for doubling the beams, 1 projector for the timer, 1 Lego wall for projecting the timer, 1 smoke machine, 1 fan, 2 arduinos with ethernet shields and 1 dmx controller for win/loose light effects. The control of the game was written in Javascript as a Node.js application which, thanks to its amazing websockets integration, allowed the real time monitoring of the sensors and the over all control of the system ( calibration etc ) through a nice and simple web interface. The node server was communicating with the two Arduinos through UDP and was also responsible for controlling the dmx light effects as well as starting and stopping the timer which was written as a small openFrameworks application.