At the 2010 Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver, 20 lasers were used in a
nightly light show in which people from around the world controlled the beams
through public Internet access.
mirror—which was made of
aluminized Mylar and spanned
90 feet across. In the main hall,
visitors could see their reflections hanging upside down
above their heads. To get to that
hall, they walked through a dark
clam-shaped room illuminated
by sound-activated laser beams
shining downward and tracing
Lissajous figures on the floor.
E.A. T. commissioned Cross and
Jeffries to design the laser-and-sound display.
An estimated 2 million
people visited the Pepsi Pavilion during the six months of
Expo ’70. However, according to Cross’s website, company officials were not able to
maintain the technical exhibits
to the artists’ standards, and
the building was demolished
soon after the exposition ended.
Cross moved to the University of Iowa and created a mixed-gas argon-krypton ion laser show—complete with symphony
orchestra, soloists and electronic music—for the opening of a
new campus auditorium in 1972.
Scientist Elsa Garmire pioneered the use of textured lenses to create these artistic “lumia” effects for Laserium.
Garmire explores her artistic side
Toward the end of the 1960s, Elsa Garmire, a postdoc at
Caltech who had received her doctorate at MIT under OSA
Honorary Member Charles H. Townes, found that her
research into ultra-short laser pulses had become stalled. So,
for a few years, she turned her attention to experiments that
brought art and technology together.
As part of Caltech’s celebration of the first moon landing
in 1969, Garmire designed a laser light “wall” that people
could walk through. In another experiment, she and her
friends hauled an argon laser all the way to the top of the
campus library and staged a light show. Garmire was assisted
by a graduate student who held a mirror to reflect the beam.
Although she knew how to make Lissajous figures, Garmire
was more interested in creating abstract diffraction patterns
through textured glass and plastic. “I wanted to be a pure
artist,” she said. Through her experimentation, she discovered
that Duco household cement
formed bubbles when it dried
on glass and made the most
interesting patterns when a
laser shone through those
At an E.A.T. conference
at the University of Southern California in November
1970, Garmire displayed
photographs of her artwork
and invited the filmmaker
Ivan Dryer to visit her lab.
Dryer set up a 16-mm movie
camera, but when he saw
the brilliant patterns of laser
speckles on the wall, he realized that “film would not
cover the intense color and
scope” of the laser effects and
became convinced that live
lasers would be better than
any motion picture.
A onetime college astron-
omy major, Dryer had volunteered off and on for a decade
as a guide at Griffith Observatory, a public science center in
downtown Los Angeles. So, using a single He-Ne laser and
one of Garmire’s lumia for creating interference patterns that
made an “undulating, kind of organic image among the stars,”
he prepared a demonstration show for Griffith officials and
proposed calling the show Laserium, or “house of the lasers.”
Undaunted by Griffith’s initial rejection, in January 1973
Dryer formed a company called Laser Images Inc., with
Garmire as president. The company provided some laser
effects for a rock-music documentary called Medicine Ball
Caravan, as well as some live concerts by Alice Cooper and a
building’s grand opening.
Garmire eventually decided to return to scientific research.
After her stint at Caltech, she spent two decades at USC—
during which she served as OSA’s 1993 President. She is now an
OSA Fellow and engineering professor at Dartmouth College
in New Hampshire.
In June 1973, the Laserium team borrowed a 1-W krypton
laser from SpectraPhysics and set up another demonstration in a vacant Caltech lab. Of the 120 invitees, only two
showed up—but one was the new Griffith director, William J.
Kaufmann III, a young science popularizer and a “pretty hip