Over the years the performance, brightness and associated visibility of the lasers has significantly increased, especially with the availability of further advanced laser technology and multi color laser light sources, offering spectacular shows for almost every event and budget.
Laser lightshow event companies have added further features to "just" the lasers, and today offer multi media shows including laser light/beam shows fireworks, video projection, LED illumination, sound and even performers in a single show event.
Customers for these temporary shows are hosts of big sporting events, corporate meetings or presentations, rock,- pop and folk concerts and festivals on one hand as well as, weddings or private events for the smaller budgets on the other hand.
Larger outdoor attractions, Theme Parks, hotels and resorts and night clubs usually purchase the equipment offering the shows on an hourly or daily basis for their visitors.
Enabling technology for these events has been the availability of smaller, less expensive and easier to handle lasers with hands free operation in all environmental conditions.
A significant contributor on the laser side has been Coherent Inc. with their OPSL (Optically pumped Semiconductor Laser) based Taipan platform which is available in 10 different wavelengths from blue (460nm) to red (639 nm) and up to 10 W of output power out of an compact laser head.
These air cooled lasers have allowed the various entrenched companies in this business to design and build very compact, high brightness laser projectors offering full color garmut projection with high speed modulation and laptop computer control, fitting in a small box allowed for standard checked airplane baggage.
The much easier transportation, installation and running of the wall plug have opened up many more opportunities, allowing these companies to make much more use of their equipment resulting in an overall lower cost of ownership for renting, set up/tear down and the actual show event.
Good by to large frame ion lasers which required multiple operators, 380V , water cooling and expensive shipping!
The success of the 2007 released Taipan series with the up to now unbelievable > 2000 installations and > 10KW of accumulated visible laser power has convinced Coherent to do the next step in lightshow laser technology, now offering an even more brighter and powerful laser ideally suited for outdoor long throw applications like the example of the laserkinetics/Russia installation in Vladivostok using Laseranimation Sollinger GmbH BLITZ basic laser projectors.
The new Viper features a single mode TEM00 beam for highest brightness, 20 W of output power at 532 nm and full modulation capability in a very compact platform.
Since the new Viper is also OPSL technology based it holds promise for wavelength and power scalability same as happened with the Taipan series which iteratively scaled in number of wavelength and power over the recent years.
Coherent's new Viper and Taipan laser based equipment are available via Coherent's certified integrators only http://www.coherent.com/...