Kryo Man - WTF?

[Speculative Lasers - Dan]

15 characters....

[gottaluvlasers]

We need to start policing ourselves and not sit back and wait for "the other guy" to report dangerous practices.

Woody Strzrelecki
CDRH

woody dott strzelecki att fda dot hhs dot gov

Cool guy and **HE DOES** (and encourages) reports of non-compliant laser practices.

-Marc

[LELS]

I couldnt agree more with Marc.

I know there is a music event he is "headlining" in Denver coming up that they are announcing will be the "KRYOMAN WITH VISUAL SYMPHONY PREMIERE!!! ONLY AT THE PULSE MUSIC FESTIVAL!!! Looks like it's about a month away. If he truly is dumb enough to pull the same sh*t this would be a great time for the FDA to make an example of his/her continuous public misuse of a Class III or IV laser.

Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/events/121752904626693/

[KevSki]

At a gig in Liverpool last night had a visit from the one of the Predatrons...complete with green laser, single beam on right hand possibly around 300mw? it looked fairly hot, no scanning. And a blue (445nm) doing wide scanning I think on its left shoulder.
All our lasers were shut down during the 'performance'. .... he was no more than 2 meters away from the punters ...Sorry no pics I was at the other end of the club room....These things are obviously more popular then ever.
k

[dnar]

At a gig in Liverpool last night had a visit from the one of the Predatrons...complete with green laser, single beam on right hand possibly around 300mw? it looked fairly hot, no scanning. And a blue (445nm) doing wide scanning I think on its left shoulder.
All our lasers were shut down during the 'performance'. .... he was no more than 2 meters away from the punters ...Sorry no pics I was at the other end of the club room....These things are obviously more popular then ever.
k

Your post raises a question for me in terms of Risk Exposure (from a laser operators perspective, not the punters).

So, your performing a laser show in a club, all within safe limits. Kyro man shows up and does his stuff.

What if a punter at that show later presents with eye damage? You could find yourself in a legal battle to determine which lasers did the damage.

[absolom7691]

I know this has gone beyond suggesting designs to make this type of show better/safe, but a suggestion for any other performer that 'mimics' this type of display... Is there an electronic level that uses accelerometers (similar to smartphones) that you can add to the hands? You could 0 it with the hands pointed straight up at the ceiling. And from 0°~ say, 70°, the lasers stay at full power as this would mean that the lasers would still be pointed above the crowd, and then as the the level of the hands passes 70°, the lasers attenuate, or possibly attenuate and scan, thus lowering the MPE when the beams reach eye level. That would give the performer freedom to flail their hands about and wield their "lazors" around safely. It would be kinda like a poor man's beam mapping. Just a thought. I do think the act is pretty neat and is probably no doubt fun to see, but if he is lying about the power levels (which is probably the case) then it is a very dangerous and illegal display and needs some work or needs to cease.

[White-Light]

Your post raises a question for me in terms of Risk Exposure (from a laser operators perspective, not the punters).

So, your performing a laser show in a club, all within safe limits. Kyro man shows up and does his stuff.

What if a punter at that show later presents with eye damage? You could find yourself in a legal battle to determine which lasers did the damage.

Well talking generally about other operators and not Kryo man in particular (nothing is proven with regards to him remember), I think that's a potential problem and that's also where you need your own exposure levels well documented. If you can show yours were below MPE and the other company (whoever they may be), has no paperwork of measured levels, then it will be offer greater protection.

The real problem would come if they also had "paperwork" (legitimate or faked) to show their levels were within MPE as then the battle would be on to show who was responsible.

The big problem in any case is in the absence of liability being admitted by the responsible party / their insurers, is anyone suing would most likely sue both operators jointly using joint and severable liability and then the battle would be on in court for the operators to show which operator was the one in breach which means a lot of hassle and expense for the innocent party - more so if the other party had "paperwork".

Maybe the only way for those legitimate in this industry to protect themselves from any potentially unmeasured source would be to refuse to work with any event which also had other lasers of any other source involved.

Another less extreme way, might be to video your own MPE measurement procedure so you can prove that MPE was complied with although the only trouble here is that any solicitor worth his salt, will then question as to whether or not levels were exceeded during the show or whether or not the software outputted something over MPE during the show due to a glitch or operator error. Again in the absence of constant video'ed monitoring of levels throughout the show, its going to come down to one word against another's. This is where you having paperwork and the other guy not, comes into it's own as it's far easier to cast aspersions against someone who has undocumented show than one who has. In that case, I'd favour the guy with paperwork every time as the court would most likely take paperwork at face value and go against the undocumented show. If both parties have paperwork, well see above!

[White-Light]

I know this has gone beyond suggesting designs to make this type of show better/safe, but a suggestion for any other performer that 'mimics' this type of display... Is there an electronic level that uses accelerometers (similar to smartphones) that you can add to the hands? You could 0 it with the hands pointed straight up at the ceiling. And from 0°~ say, 70°, the lasers stay at full power as this would mean that the lasers would still be pointed above the crowd, and then as the the level of the hands passes 70°, the lasers attenuate, or possibly attenuate and scan, thus lowering the MPE when the beams reach eye level. That would give the performer freedom to flail their hands about and wield their "lazors" around safely. It would be kinda like a poor man's beam mapping. Just a thought. I do think the act is pretty neat and is probably no doubt fun to see, but if he is lying about the power levels (which is probably the case) then it is a very dangerous and illegal display and needs some work or needs to cease.

Whereas I'm not saying it couldn't be done, it strikes me as complicated and risky. It would most likely be bulky as there would be a pc of some description involved, even if just a note pad. There's always a risk of a positional sensor malfunctioning or software crash on a low powered pc. Build in double to triple sensing redundancy and you have a lot of bulk.

The safest way to preform a Kryo man style act in my opinion is to use less than 5mw of 532nm and crank the haze up 1st.

[KevSki]

Your post raises a question for me in terms of Risk Exposure (from a laser operators perspective, not the punters).

So, your performing a laser show in a club, all within safe limits. Kyro man shows up and does his stuff.

What if a punter at that show later presents with eye damage? You could find yourself in a legal battle to determine which lasers did the damage.

Yes... you are absolutley correct. It was a sponsored event and we had no prior knowledge that this operator was using lasers. It was further complicated because there was another laser operator working on behalf of the sponsor, who was also surprised, he too shut down his laser. At that moment the safe thing to do was probably was to quit, however, we would be fair game in any legal battle simply because we had used lasers all night, punters probably would not care who was responsible and beacuse of the alchohol consumed could say it happened earlier before the appearance of Predatron, they may not know when it happend. The only thing in our favour is that we do shows regualarly in that venue and management know how we work, but as you say it could have been 3 way legal battle. So we are put at risk by these operators without doubt.
k

[buffo]

Again in the absence of constant video'ed monitoring of levels throughout the show, its going to come down to one word against another's.

For the past two years we've had a laser safety expert put on a 1-day training class the day after SELEM ends. In 2010 it was Casey Stack doing a general laser safety class, and in 2011 it was Greg Makhov doing the ILDA Laser Safety Officer training. In both classes it was recommended that operators install a cheap video camera connected to a computer in the venue before each show. The purpose of the camera is to capture the entire show to PROVE that beams never went into the audience. That way if a patron tries to file suit later on (claiming a laser eye injury), you have video evidence to back up your claims that such an injury could not have been caused by your projectors, because the beams never went into the crowd.

Of course, this only works in the US where audience-scanning is not normally done. If you are in Europe and have plans to do audience-scanning, then you'll probably need more supporting evidence, but even so, a video of the show will go a long way towards proving your competence.

Another suggestion was to capture the position feedback signal from each scanner and record it on a computer in real time. This would require a custom analong-to-digital converter and some monitoring software, but it wouldn't be terribly difficult to set up. Now, in addition to the video evidence, you would have proof (in the form of accurate position indication) that the scanners never dipped below a certain point (or if they did, in the case of a crowd-scanning show, they were at least in constant motion, minimizing the exposure).

Given how cheap digital storage is these days, I have to say that both ideas made a lot of sense...

Adam