LOBO lasers give birth to BMW’s Eco Brand “i”

All eyes in the room are spellbound by the shadow-like appearance inside the endlessly seeming tunnel of pure light, which finally turns out to be BMW’s new eco-racer i8. Just a few seconds later, BMW’s vision of an urban everyday e-car, called “i3”, becomes reality when breaking though its birth canal of laser light.

This day is a milestone for BMW. With unbelievable efforts, BMW stages the launch of the new sub-brand “i”. Already two months before the actual start of the International Motor Show IAA, BMW already finished all works on its exhibition stand, which covers the entire hall 11.0 of the Exhibition Center in Frankfurt.

Similar to the presentation of the Vision Efficient Dynamics car, the technological predecessor of the i8, BMW again relied on the internationally renowned laser specialist LOBO for staging its pioneering eco product line.

Above that, the creative brains of Bluescope envisaged an especially nifty role for the laser: cleverly placed and gracefully moving laser surfaces cover all those areas of the vast exhibition area, which were not intended for the public at this time.

LOBO’s Creative Director Alexander Hennig: "Presently we experience an unbelievable interest in our lasers at high-profile events like this one. On one hand this is due to the new technical possibilities of our ultra-bright sparks lasers, which not only revolutionized the handling and use of lasers, but which also reduced the power consumption and the Carbon footprint of lasers to only 1% at the same brightness. And on the other hand these lasers of the latest generation are the conclusive response to the question of many creative minds and makers, what kind of innovative techniques will be able to present today’s topics in the post-LED era. Here at BMW e.g. it was the task to the combine the aspect “Innovation” with an uncompromising ecologically-oriented product design. And for this purpose sparks lasers were the perfect match, as they share the same philosophy and as they can be applied without goggles and double floor for real three-dimensional effects.

Also in another aspect sparks laser could demonstrate their strengths: thanks to their modular system architecture, LOBO was able to comply with the client’s wish to have an extremely strong light output in blue. It was not more than just re-configuring the blue laser module for this job. Finally each of those high-power RGB lasers covering the entire hall 11.0 with a roof of light, counted on up to 11W output power just for the blue color with an entire brightness of 7698 W/m2.