Ha, a day after you mentioned the above project and i finally receive the vvvv book and see your project in there!! Congrats!
I don’t have much experience with vertical sync, but did a lot of the things mentioned in the book. I built a horizontal slider that is similar to the example in the book, except the whole screen was sliding. It was actually an old Titanium Macbook with the screen turned upside down (what a surgery that was!!) and a mouse wheel as the sensor. The problem is they are not very accurate and always relative. So i looked into other solutions and its mostly industrial stuff that is way too expensive or not even available over the counter. After it seemed that pretty much everyone who studied interaction design has built a horizontal slider thingy of some sort once and that it isnt the most practical thing ever, i kind of put that one to rest and am working on a new side project now (sadly i’m not a student anymore), which still needs to use horizontal distance measuring, but will rely on absolute distance measurement using laser distance measuring - it was quite expensive, but will be a lot more accurate and reliable :)
Having said that, i’d love to have a go on that exhibit you made. Is it still exhibited somewhere?