I've had this idea for a while but I need to offload some ideas so, the spirit of letting go...

I'm confused as to why this thing hasn't been turned into a musical control device.

It would be such an amazing experience to throw together graphic scores, to play it like an instrument with your fingers that could could read your finger print ridges, to have a record-like disk running underneath it. You could do super cool scroll loops with disappearing ink. You could strap it to an RC car and read the floor as a score. It would be great to pair with string physical modelling. You could put a fish tank on top of it and shine a light into it and record the waves. It's actually got a high enough scan rate to do low quality audio, you could probably hold it up to a guitar string a get a really good reading. Obviously you can read bar codes with it.

I'm just not a knowledgeable enough electrical engineer to ever get it working but it just seems to be limitless (in my mind at least)