For San Antonio’s “Luminaria Contemporary Arts Festival” in 2025, Laser Spectacles presented “Interactive Laser Fun”! We set up in a parking lot across from the huge wall of the Staybridge Suites Hotel, and projected laser images of attendees dancing and having fun in our play area.
The wall was visible both from the festival grounds around St. Paul’s Square, and also visible to people driving north on Interstate 35 past the Alamodome.
What happened that was interactive?
We played music the whole time to give the participants a groove to dance with if they wished. It was Interactive Laser Dancing! Many attendees stepped in and danced while their images were projected in real time with lasers upon the hotel wall. Dog owners found that their furry pets showed up just as well as themselves!! The lasers projected not only the dancers! We also projected audio-reactive laser imagery to surround the dancers and provide a tight connection to the music.
How was all this accomplished?
We used the program TouchDesigner running on a PC laptop extensively in this activation. To begin with, a Kinect camera was fed into TouchDesigner. The program extracted the body imagery, and directly projected the laser graphics.
In addition, a second instance of TouchDesigner used our custom program to turn the music into MIDI signals. The MIDI signals then drove a Lasergraph DSP laser show computer to create the surrounding audio-reactive laser imagery. The latency for all images was very low, and the real time reaction time for the dancers was very tight. Here is a video of the show:
All in all, everyone had a great time! The happiness in the air created a wonderful feeling for the festival. Interactive Laser Dancing!
