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First of all, I'm wondering if you guys think this is a viable idea for a Kickstarter project. I believe this would function like an artistic grant. By the project's end, several cities would get an unusual and unique, completely interactive light display.

In order to deliver a beautiful finished project, I'll need to draw lots of complex geometry. This requires that I raise the money necessary in order to build several high-quality projectors to comprise a distributed multi-projection array. I may need to build between 10 to 20 units to support a large-scale game, and I'll need a few Core i7 machines to coordinate lots of simultaneous I/O. It's not cheap, but the results would be astounding.

I'll need to work up a few different hardware configurations that can be funded at different levels depending on donor interest. The projectors I have now cost about $1,300/each. The components are neither bright nor precise, and you can see that in my videos.

I think a sweet spot is a $3,000-$5,000 build per projector as I'll need a lot more Wattage, better color, vastly improved beam collimation, high speed, and high scan angle. Another possibility would be to get a fewer number of super fast and bright projectors ($10,000) and support that with many more lower quality units (such as mine) that would be used for projectile and particle effects. Additionally there's the DACs and computational hardware to budget for, but that's modest in comparison to building the projector array.

With this hardware, I propose building several of the following games:

- Tetris

- Tetris Attack

- Breakout

- Donkey Kong

- Space Invaders

- Galaga

- Ikaruga-like shoot 'em up

- A shoot 'em up where you play against your own scanned face/image

- (There are probably a lot of additional games that can be suggested for this list.)

Some of these games might have legal/licensing issues attached that I'll have to investigate, so generic or completely novel ideas might be chosen instead.

In addition to programming games for the projectors, I am also interested in building an interactive canvas that would allow local artists (or kids or whomever is interested) to draw on the buildings. Painting with lasers is a really neat experience.

To make this even more of a community experience, I'll post weekly or twice-weekly videos detailing the experiments, algorithms, personal anecdotes and lessons, hardware build progress, etc. And although I'd be building code for an array of projectors (as opposed to a single projector), I could provide code access for those with projectors or for those who want to build one and experiment for themselves.

Further, I could release a multiprojection emulator that allows other game devs to build for the platform. I'll be building an emulator for multi-projection to support my own work anyway, so I may as well open source it.

Does this sound feasible or ridiculous?

If you think it could work, I'm also mulling over what kind of rewards would be good to offer to donors. This isn't strictly a "product", so that may be one of the biggest pitfalls with funding a project like this.

Some ideas I have are as follows:

- Standard t-shirt, "name in credits", etc.

- Project your name, graphic, or (appropriate) message onto a building (with approval)

- Build and deliver a 1W, 30Kpps laser projector (EE isn't my specialty, so I couldn't offer this in bulk -- although I could team up with an EE colleague)

- Travel to an event and project laser video games or custom shows

- Travel to a corporate launch party or company event and project stuff (a higher end reward)

- Write a game inspired by an arcade game of your choice (a very high end reward as it would take time)

Some of the "stretch goals" I could offer might be:

- Live stream skyscraper gaming on Twitch or another service

- Internet-enabled socket-based, live-streaming skyscraper gaming on Twitch or another service

- Turn a building into a Twitter feed

- Turn a building into an interactive drawing canvas (possibly internet-enabled) as detailed above

- Write an NES emulator or at least duplicate some simple games

- Travel to various cities as voted on by the donors (and with proper building approval)

- Publish the low level interface that works with several DACs as open source

- Publish a higher-level graphics engine

- Open source everything

I think this could be accomplished in a 6-10 month time frame, with certain interactive milestones being accomplished in spring, others coming online in summer, with ultimate completion of all of the tasks by fall.

What do you guys think? Could this be a viable Kickstarter project? How would you go about setting this up? Can you think of better rewards/offers? Is there a better angle to market this idea?

I really want to do this, but is it just an unrealistic flight of fancy?

Thanks, HN!