Safety professionals pay special attention to secondary impacts, which are experienced during key activities such as driving on busy highways. If the driver loses control due to instant visual effects or psychological effects (fright or panic), the consequences may be very bad. It is reported that after a similar incident with a more powerful light show Laser pointer, the pilot had to look away or hand over control of the landing aircraft to the co-pilot.
Even with this modification, the manufacture of the device is by no means easy. Part of the reason is that the task of growing bottom nitride objective lenses for blue and green VCSELs is more challenging than that of arsenide-based devices. The atoms in the AlGaAs and GaAs crystal structures are separated by almost the same distance, so when one material grows on the other, no strain is accumulated in the structure. This is important, because if left uncontrolled, strain may cause defects that degrade performance.
SureFire first manufactured the green aiming laser engraver in the mid-1990s. However, due to heat issues, the company was unable to bring its green laser to the market because it was looking for a military contract, not a commercial market. Until recently, manufacturers have largely overcome the heat dissipation problem, and this technology was put on hold for about 10 years. This is not to say that green lasers are not easy to overheat when they are activated for a long time, or that they can work normally in extremely cold weather, but these problems are not considered to be an obstacle to today’s commercial market.
People usually have a strong psychological reaction to blue laser pointer beam irradiation. A researcher found that sometimes people get hurt not from the beam itself, but from strong reactions, including rubbing hard or sticking fingers to the eyes.
More recently, Sony’s engineers unveiled a new design that has broken the 10 mW barrier. It features a far larger cavity and a curved mirror, formed by etching the backside of the substrate and depositing a dielectric stack on this surface. In November 2018 team spokesperson Tatsushi Hamaguchi announced that they had achieved an output power of 12 mW for their blue-emitting VCSEL. At the Photonics West conference in San Francisco, US, a few months later, Hamaguchi revealed a further increase, to 15.4 mW.