OPTICAL SETUP — pulsed component panorama
OpticalSetup's own flagship demo: the words "OPTICAL SETUP" traced entirely in live pulsed light, exercising nearly every category in the component library.
Open in the canvas →Background
This one isn't a recreation of a textbook or laboratory setup — it's a self-referential showcase built to put as much of the component library on screen at once as a single readable scene allows. Every visible letter stroke is a real traced beam path, not a drawn shape: acousto-optic and electro-optic modulators, a chopper, a nonlinear crystal, a mechanical delay line, dichroics and filters, a grating, waveplates, an isolator, an objective, a polarizing beamsplitter, a PMT, polarizers, a specimen and its stage, a spatial light modulator, and a supercontinuum laser all contribute strokes — including one letter, the "U," that is carried by an actual propagating fiber path rather than a free-space beam.
What this setup demonstrates
Select any component in the embedded canvas below to inspect its live parameters and its capability badge — simulated, needs setup, or diagram-only — the same three-way distinction used everywhere in OpticalSetup. Because pulsed timing drives the animation, the scene also doubles as a stress test of the pulse-timing overlay across very different component types at once: modulators gating in time, a mechanical delay line adding path length, and a fiber carrying a pulse train through a completely different rendering path than a free-space beam.
Because this scene exists to showcase breadth rather than to teach one physical setup, treat individual component behavior as the subject — for the physics and simplifications behind any single component visible here, follow the related links below to its wiki page rather than reading this scene as a coherent experiment.