ILDA
is The International Laser Display Association
(http://www.laserist.org).
Their website describes their purpose, so I will leave it up to the reader
to go there. For the purpose of this website, I will briefly describe what
the ILDA file format is and how it relates to EZFB.
The ILDA file format
is a specification for exchanging laser display art
in a generic, non system specific way. Technically speaking, an individual
ILDA file may contain zero to thousands of still images and / or color
palettes. It is similar in concept to an animated gif, however, the images
are not raster and they are not limited to 2D. The images are vector and
may be either 2D or 3D.
Typically, a laser puts out a single beam of super intense light.
When that beam hits a surface, like a movie screen, it produces a
very small, very bright spot; a single point of light. If the beam
is bounced off of a mirror and the mirror is moving, the beam will be
deflected and the spot will move on the screen. Now imaging the beam
is bounced off of two mirrors. One mirror can deflect the beam up and
down and the other can deflect the beam left to right. If the mirrors
move fast enough, the human eye will see that single spot streak into
what appears to be a solid line. This effect is very similar to the way
an oscilloscope works. This is how images are drawn with laser light.
Images can be stored digitally as series of still frames. A laser
image is a series of points in space. The laser follows these points,
in order, just like a connect-the-dots drawing. The way the points are
stored in the file is in 16 bit integer coordinates for either 2D; X and Y,
or 3D; X, Y, and Z. In very general terms, this is the ILDA file format
specification.
I have written a driver in C++ to be able to open and display ILDA
files within EZFB. I have also written an application that uses this
driver and EZFB to generate, display, transform and save ILDA art.
The following series of images were taken from
laserboy,
running at 640x480 8bpp. The utility
grab
was used to capture the contents of the screen to a bitmap file.
Both laserboy and grab are included, with several other demonstration
applications in the free distribution of
EZFB.