Designing them to light up an entire room or shine a beam over a long distance is far more technically challenging and requires higher production costs.
The same approach has been used in ground-based experiments to beam one kilowatt of power over a distance of several kilometres, notes Peter Fisher, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Commercially obtained laser pointers project just a tiny beam, but its diameter grows much bigger as the distance increases and can result in temporarily blindness if shone in someone's eyes.