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This reminds me of the carbon arc days when a small hole was drilled into the lamphouse so the arc image could be projected on the wall.

That way, the arc target could be viewed by the projectionist without him or her getting out of the easy chair to check the trim.

In your case, it could determine a number of abnormal things to a very keen eye at a quick glance while walking past the machine.

It's weird. If the light is stationary... you can clearly see the bulb, filiament, the porcelain socket, the cloth covered wiring leads to the socket, and even the heads of the phillips head screws that hold the socket in place - all projected on the wall. If the motor on the fixture is turning, all you see is just the colored lights moving across the floor and wall.

The fixtures have a focused lens across the front of them, so I guess that's why everything is so clearly defined.

The hole is there because they couldn't shape the metal around the x,y and z axis or didn't want to.

Several years ago, the Movie Machine Society and the NY Photographic Society held symposia at George Eastman House in Rochester, where a camera obscura was set up in a circular tent, providing bright views
of the Eastman Estate gardens on a table. As the lens rotated 360'
the viewer got a panoramic view.

I used to have my students make pinhole cameras from coffee cans and cereal boxes, and some noteworthy prints resulted.

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We cut it down until it was about 6" tall, then used an X-Acto Knife to cut a square hole, about 1" square, in the side about 1/2 way up. A pinhole was punched into a square of thin sheet metal, which was cut out of the bottom of an "E-Z Foil" pie pan. That was fixed to the inside of the "camera with a piece of gaffer's tape. The "shutter" was made from a piece of the container, left over from what was cut off the top. It was fixed to the outside of the "camera" with another piece of gaff tape, so as to make a flap.

Our teacher cut us a bunch of squares of photo paper in the darkroom and put them into "paper safes" that we made from more oatmeal boxes. Everybody got about 1/2 dozen pieces of paper and we were turned loose to roam the school. (A camera was considered a hall pass IF you were in photography class.) We'd duck into a closet to load our cameras and emerge with a piece of paper loaded into it.

We would set them up on a window ledge, or some place, open the shutter and count to 50 (or whatever). When we were out of paper we'd go back down to the lab and develop them. We made prints by the contact method the same way you detailed, Paul

One time my friend and I snatched a bunch of paper and took our cameras home with us over the weekend. We drove around town taking pictures. We used the trunk of our parent's car as a mobile darkroom.