World’s most powerful laser art setup to date: Global Rainbow Project

The col­ors of the rain­bow in order: red, orange, yel­low, green, blue, indigo and violet.

A friend of mine works for a pro­duc­tion com­pany, Light­wave Inter­na­tional, that spe­cial­izes in set­ting up laser light shows and spe­cial effects at par­ties.  When he first started work­ing with them, we were all very happy for him because his hobby turned into a full blown awe­some career.  He went from set­ting up lasers for our own lit­tle house par­ties to now play­ing a large role in the visu­als at world-renowned festivals.

Now look what’s hap­pened… he’s helped cre­ate the world’s most pow­er­ful laser setup… and it’s not just green… but all the col­ors of the rainbow!

This was envi­sioned and com­mis­sioned by artist Yvette Mat­tern and used at Le Lieu Unique in Nantes, France.

At 0:28 some of the beams are vibrat­ing from the bass of music nearby. At such long dis­tances those tiny vibra­tions become very pro­nounced and obvi­ous.  The laser was reported to be seen from places as far as 60km away!  Here is an ama­teur video dur­ing the test-run before it was fully powered.

Some nerd specs

  • 174 watts of inter­nal laser power and approx­i­mately 140 watts of out­put power from a sin­gle projector
  • All air cooled (no water cool­ing) and the whole sys­tem is run off of two 16amp circuits
  • Reported to be seen from up to 60km away

To give you an idea of how pow­er­ful 140 watts of power is for a laser… The $20 green-laser-pen I have whose beam can be seen very well at night for miles is about 0.02watts (20 milliwatts).