A system and method for real-time, simultaneous, and adaptive beam steering into multiple regions of interest replaces conventional raster scanning, where only regions of interest are scanned by a laser or other optical beam. CUDA-OpenGL interoperability with a computationally time-efficient computer-generated hologram (CGH) calculation algorithm enables such beam steering by employing a phase-spatial light modulator (SLM). The real-time CGH generation and display algorithm is incorporated into the beam steering system with variable power and scan resolution, which are adaptively controlled by camera-based object recognition.