Eliminate bulbs in pinball?

What the HECK are you talking about?  I'm sure you've heard Ben talk about this many times, replace bulbs with some sort of laser projection, and you know what?  I think he's onto something.  This probably sounds crazy, crazy like computers eliminating wires and transmitting data with lasers, or cooling computers with waterlines instead of fans.  But you know, it's really not that far stretched.  Lighting under a playfield is a wiring mess that isn't easily managed.  Also wires are easily cut, sockets are easily shorted.  In fact just the other day I watched a video on Clay Harrell's pinball ninja website where a demolition man wouldn't even boot from a insert light failure.  Turns out, one of the bayonet sockets got turned and grounded to one of the playfield rails.  It wasn't until he unplugged the IDC connectors a few times and saw a spark that he started to figure it out.  Also, after resetting the fuse, he let it boot with the playfield up.  Sure enough as soon as the rail touched the lockdown bar, it shorted out and caused the machine to freak out.

So I just recently got one of those green lasers off ebay for $5.  I had one a while back but it broke, I got another one to use as a pointer during powerpoint presentations at work.  Anyway, it's amazing how much light you can get off a couple AAA batteries.  Now take that focused light and bounce it off a couple mirrors, you can light up a room pretty quick.

So I thought, well what if you did somehow shine lasers up into the inserts?  Would you need a bunch of individual lasers?  That still wouldn't be the worst thing in the world, $5 for each laser vs $1-$2 per bayonet socket plus another dollar for the LED bulb.  But then you'd still have the problem of "which laser isn't firing? Or is there a short in the wire? Or is it the lamp driverboard?" when you start having insert light issues.  So then I thought "well, maybe you have some sort of spinning mirror and you PWM the laser so it only fires at certain rotations, thereby sharing that single lasers among 12 outputs (sort of like the DLP televisions of yesteryear).  That's not a bad design if it were reliable, I think there's a reason why DLP went away (and it's not just because LCD got really cheap).  I believe the alignment of laser vs spinning motor was not very reliable and you ended up with blurred images.

So then I thought well... They do have reasonably inexpensive RGB laser projectors.  You know, those boxes that project very bright lines at clubs:


Or the vector animations, like this inexpensive $170 one from spencer's gifts:

The projector from Spencers is not only cheap, it allows you to create your own animations to put on an SD card (there's software that will convert bitmap to vectors).  This certainly simplifies it further.  If you mapped the entire underside of your playfield (so you pick a spot where each insert is), and then simply create single images for every possible scenario, you could simply load that image for whatever mode you have.  The only thing I would question is whether or not you could fill an entire playfield from only a couple feet away, even with perhaps 2 projectors to share the work?

Well let's take this a step further, perhaps we don't need lasers, maybe all we really need is a really bright display, I don't know like a video projector?  You're in a relatively dark enclosed cabinet, and projectors are REALLY cheap.  Like I'm talking about if you don't mind cheap chinese import crap, a relatively decent mini projector can be had for $60:
http://www.dx.com/p/ruiq-uc-30-24w-portable-mini-lcd-projector-w-sd-av-vga-hdmi-black-us-plug-100-240v-233749#.U0yi5qIVDD0

Even though you don't give a crap about resolution (you're only trying to get colors), it actually has a resolution of 1920 x 1080.  The specs also say 1 meter - 3.8 meter throw.  I don't know what size you'd end up with at only a couple feet, but again maybe you simply divide and conquer by having 2 displays at a short throw inside.

Another idea for video projection, animating 3d objects on the playfield.  Maybe Gerry Stellenberg has it all wrong with his flat LCD panel on the playfield?  I'm sure you've seen music videos by now where they've got a miniature foam mockup sitting on a table, and a projector starts adding animations to it, giving it an eerie 3d effect:


Mapping is really just setting up a projector, live tracing whatever object you intend on projecting onto, tracing it in some paint program, then creating animations in those spaces:

Sure seems like even in a fairly brightly lit room, the projection still shows up well (just like in a conference room where most of the lights are still on).