Transit Center – Long Beach, CA

Downtown Light Show Brightens Transit Center

Over the past few years the City of Long Beach California has been building up their transportation system. The Passport Center on Pine Avenue is where the Light Rail and Busses meet, and the Long Beach Transit Authority wanted to create something special. They came up with an architectural design consisting of six sculpted towers lining the Avenue. These towers are lit with color cycling LED lights and topped off with a grid of brilliant green laser beams, which bounce from tower to tower 25 feet above the street.

The laser system consists of a single 50-watt I-2000 YAG laser with 2 fiber optically fed remote projectors. The projectors are mounted on top of the center 2 towers on each side of the street. From these 2 positions the laser beams project into 4 laser heads, also mounted on towers, for mirror bounces and termination.

The solution created by Laser Fantasy uses one of our ILDA- compliant Laser Fantasy Infinity 2000 lasers, with show playback coming from an off-the-shelf DMX recorder. Programmed with a standard lighting board, the display jumps the laser beams between thousands of possible positions and combinations.

To meet the special safety requirements of this client, we created a custom controller which monitors beam position and termination 10,000 times per second. If any beam is not detected at its correct termination point, the laser is completely terminated in less than 1/1000 of a second. In the first year of nightly operation, the only required maintenance was a single cleaning of the laser output and detection windows.