I think the laser thing is maybe possible, I was looking at this home made spy gadgets book with a plan in it to make a high powered nightvision illuminator from a laser. It looked like he just spread the beam with a little 10x optic peice, and it put off easily 10x the illumination as an LED illuminator spread over a nice area at a HUUUGE distance but it got me thinking... why not i have a few optic peices i collected when i saw an article on solar puffing ( no matches or lighters ) so I guess all there is to do is get one, or some, of those xbox hd-dvd drives and see if the the 405nm/650nm/780nm lights it can produce are 'close enough' building something to heatsink them and power them is not a big deal then finding a lens or combination of lenses that give the right amount of beam spread and probably shine it through something to difuse the light but perhaps not, results would say for sure.