Laser Touchpool

(I forgot to take a picture of this when I still had my murky milk-water solution that made the laser trajectory visible, so there is temporarily no photo for this prototype.)

In the beginning I was thinking of having an exhibition where translucent materials of different refractive indices could be fit together in different ways like puzzle pieces, and people could observe how a laser beam would pass through the pieced-together block of material. But halfway through developing that prototype, I latched onto the idea of a laser touchpool where people could have an exploration into reflections and refraction. I designed this as a shallow box with reflective surfaces on all four sides, and experimented with some materials that had interesting optical properties. The piece of calcite was one of my favorites--- it had different refractive indices for light of different polarizations, so a single beam of non-filtered light would actually be split into two beams.
The ideal interaction is that people (1-3 people at a time) would move around the objects in the water, and see the movements of the laser beam, and the pool would probably be 4-5 times as big as it is now.
One thing I would also have to adjust is to make the laser a bit brighter, so that it withstands more diffusion and reflective bounces through the pool. I would also find and add a few more objects in the pool-- as of now, I only have the calcite, the chrome spheres, a colored acrylic cube and a miniature version of the pool itself.