Alblust Das Schwäbische Alb Magazin January 2014

Light for millions. Where it appears, colorful beams cut through the night sky and figures of light dance around as if from faraway stars. Located on the outskirts of Aalen, the company LOBO builds laser systems and designs spectacular shows. All around the world.
Fog wafts through the hills of the Swabian Alb, covering the weak sun like a veil and leaving the landscape colorless. In Aalen, only a few kilometers away from this pale stillness, where the paths of inventors and visionaries like Margarete Steiff, Robert Bosch, Ferdinand Porsche and Carl Zeiss intertwine, wafts of fog also move through a room as dark as the night. A cool breeze touches the face, the floor vibrates, fires roar, water gushes. The forces of nature, seemingly cut loose, are part of a choreography. Red, green and violet beams of light shoot through the darkness, dance in tune with the music, intertwine, fan out, form tunnels and let three-dimensional figures float in space. Basses are pounding. Everything is loud, bright, breathtaking.
We are in the headquarters of LOBO. “Lo“ as in Lothar and “bo” as in Bopp. About 30 years ago, the entrepreneur founded his company, specializing in the development and construction of laser systems. On top of that, the company conceptualizes installations and designs and even executes entire shows – for amusement parks, cruise ships and planetariums, company and concert events, millennium celebrations, national holidays, Olympic Games. While the world is their stage, these shows have their first run in this multimedia studio, where clients can judge what is often worth millions of euros to them. The history of LOBO sounds like the proverbial American Dream, starting in a garage and then going straight through the roof. Basically, Lothar Bopp’s career started as a child with his first electronics science kits. As a student, he built lighting controls for clubs and discotheques, before discovering the fascination of lasers. At the age of 19, between finishing high school and starting his studies of opto-electronics at the University of Applied Sciences Aalen, he founded his company. “I had to issue invoices, so I needed a company,” he explains matter-of-factly.
The global market leader only has 30 employees
To this day, the company founder - black shoes, black pants, black shirt - is the sole director and shareholder. He obviously places great value on style, elegant materials and chic design - from his personal appearance to the projectors and the company building. His office is filled to the brim with awards for innovation and creativity, making it seem as if he had a subscription for such trophies. Back in 1996, professor of economics Hermann Simon already named LOBO as global market leader in his book “Hidden Champions”. Still, the company in the Industrial Park West on the outskirts of Aalen only has 30 employees, many of them graduates of the local University of Applied Sciences. Bopp explains: “We are producing a niche product, always setting new standards in the process. Many of our pioneering achievements have become the norm later on.”
Primarily, LOBO’s turnover is made with the sale and rental of laser systems. Years ago, these were monstrous contraptions with a consumption of 80,000 Watts and 40 liters of cooling water per minute. “For the Asian Games in the Qatari desert, we had to cool our cooling water in ice water tanks, an enormous effort,” Bopp explains. In the meantime, LOBO has introduced so-called sparks to the market: As large as a copying machine, air-cooled, 800 Watts, operable with a regular power socket. Sparks are the brightest multicolor projectors in the world. From only three colors - red, green and blue - 16 million colors can be generated. Sometimes, they are sent through the night sky for miles and projected onto giant screens, onto buildings, water curtains, fine mist (Holo Flow), mountain massifs. “For the turn of the millennium, we realized the largest projection of all times onto Table Mountain in Cape Town with a size of 400 x 300 meters,” the entrepreneur explains. Multimedia events with several projection layers are also spectacular: a video screen with a water screen for laser shapes in 3D optics in front of it. This is augmented with the impressive effect of plastic shapes on a Holo Flow. Fog can be layered over the audience, making them a part of the performance. Laser, film sequences and music, often composed specifically at the instruction of Mr. Bopp, are brought together with multimedia controllers and synchronized to the hundredth of a second. In principle, you now only have to press the start button. And the countless white spots in the audience visible on the photo of the show? “Those are phones,” the manager explains. “Often, we are already online before the show is over.”
“Bayreuth made lasers fashionable”
In 1988, LOBO was brought onboard for one of the memorable “Ring” performances of the Wagner Festival. “Bayreuth took the laser from discotheques and made it fashionable,” Bopp says. Today, companies and monarchs like to impress their clients and populace, respectively, with shows made in Aalen. Many clients are based in the countries of the former Eastern Bloc or in Arabia, with place names straight out of the stories of Arabian Nights: Oman, Qatar, Medina, Ashgabat – with Turkmenistan making little effort to leave a fairy-tale impression. “The first thing they did was take away our passports. A rather unpleasant experience,” the 50-year-old remembers. With temperatures of 25 degrees below zero, his team connected the towers of Turkmenistan’s capital Ashgabat with green laser beams, covering distances of almost 30 kilometers – the world’s largest laser installation. “Money did not matter for them at all,” Bopp says.
No one easily overtakes LOBO in the marathon race for innovation, quality and perfection. The director also explains another cornerstone for his success: the large range of his company. From the development of electronics and systems for water screens up to storyboards and soundtracks – everything is made in-house. For this reason, electronics engineers work alongside CAD designers and computer scientists and mechatronics engineers alongside designers and creative heads from the film and music industry.
In a dimly lit small office, an employee scans the drawing of a cartoon character with a computer mouse. As with conventional animated movies or a flip book, each movement requires a new drawing. Once they are digitized, they can be transferred from the computer to the laser. Each laser image is composed of a single rapid beam, speeding around in a circle invisible to the human eye. While laser is a wonderful gimmick, it is no toy, as demonstrated impressively by Lothar Bopp in the adjacent hall, where fine adjustments to the optics of the devices are made: For a short moment, he holds a felt-tip pen into the sharply bundled beam of light. In the same instant, the plastic starts to smoke. “Lasers are weapons,” he warns. They can cut through human tissue down to the bones. Hence, there are strict safety requirements for such shows.
However, the colorful beams sometimes cutting through the night sky between the company headquarters and the Aalen TV Tower about 10 km away pose no risk to human health. Then, LOBO is active on its approved laser test track – for new spectaculars made in Aalen, somewhere around the world.