After 18 months of confidential previews behind closed doors, the much-anticipated BeamKiller project from former-IES engineers Maarten Poepjes and Pieter Meijer is now slated for release at the PLASA Show in early October. Shown only to a few invited guests off-site at the recent ProLight+Sound show in Frankfurt, reports are that the narrow-angle version is now working quite reliably and for long enough to be used in performances.
BeamKiller is the device that sits on the front of a narrow-angle profile spot to cancel out the beam at a controlled distance from the fixture, allowing the beam to hit the performers but not the set or floor behind them. Based on a pair of closely-matched ultra-high resolution LCD-panels (originally developed for 4K TVs) the panels are modulated in holographic patterns to produce beam cancellation at distances ranging from 15.4 to 45.7m from the lens of the profile spot. The effect has so far only been achieved for the narrow, nearly-coherent beams from condenser lens profiles with incandescent lamps, and is unlikely to be achievable with PCs or Fresnels.
The complex holographic patterns on the LCD panels demand constant re-computation, particularly when the beam changes colour or intensity. This currently requires a micro-cluster of over 8200 CUDA parallel processors for real-time operations. The computational cluster is mounted in an external processor box at the moment, but is expected to be reduced in size by the use of custom ASICs, and built into the complete lens-mounted device by the time the BeamKiller is in production prototype. Setting the Kill Distance currently uses four DMX channels to give full 32-bit positional accuracy, although a low-resolution 16-bit mode is likely to be available.
Peter Darby from Victorian Opera who saw an engineering-prototype in action when in Europe last month, has already committed to beta testing two 12° BeamKillers from the first batch of hand-built pre-production units, with an eye to purchasing a full FOH rig.
