I have mentioned previously Hong Kong's fascination for lights. Courtesy of my Da I now know who to blame. The whole article has been shamelessly lifted from the subscription only Australian Financial Review as a service to all Hong Kongers and tourists to the Fragrant Harbour.

Turns out the bastards are fellow Australians.

An Australian company has cornered the market by creating light shows thatare wowing audiences in Asian cities. Lyndall Crisp reports from Hong Kong.

About 22 years ago Paul McCloskey was the lighting and technical director at Channel Ten where he worked on, among other programs, the infamous Number 96 , which started a whole new genre of television soapies. He was one of the first people to introduce ``intelligent" lighting lighting which can move, change color and pattern to discos, and in 1986 won the inaugural Australian Entrepreneur of The Year award by the federal government for his vision and tenacity in creating this revolutionary medium.

A bit of a pathfinder is Paul.

Fast forward to today and Laservision, the company wholly owned by McCloskey, has introduced a designer lighting format that's transforming cityscapes and venues across Asia. Its latest project fired up on January 22 when the lights of 18 buildings along the Hong Kong foreshore were switched on. The permanent, fully-automated show, which begins at 8pm and lasts 17 minutes, has attracted so many locals and tourists who pack the promenade on the Kowloon side to watch that when McCloskey tried to see it last week he couldn't get within cooee.

He had to inveigle his way onto the roof of Star House, where Laservision has a small office, to see it. The project began two years ago when the company won a tender with the Hong Kong government Tourist Commission, which was searching for ways to solve the island's massive light pollution problem.

As new buildings were being erected each tried to outdo the other with dazzling lights. In order to be noticed, every time a new office block went up it had to be twice as bright as the one next door. The whole CBD glowed as a result.

Laservision presented the tourism board with a plan to creatively light certain buildings in a way that would be efficient and cheap to run. General manager Brett Starkey said at first some owners were reluctant to embrace the idea, having already spent a fortune on lighting. ``So we went back to the Tourist Commission and said `if you do this correctly you could turn it into a lightscape'," he says. They agreed.

Based in Sydney, 90 per cent of Laservision's income derives from Asia through laser light shows, theme park installations and large scale outdoor macro media events. Before Hong Kong, its biggest outdoor project was Samsung's Everland theme park in Seoul, the largest laser spectacular in the world. Its lighting installation stretches for two kilometres and each viewing session caters for up to 10,000 people. Other major projects include Singapore's Sentosa leisure island, and Darling Harbour and the Opera House in Sydney during the 2000 Olympics.

That's the five biggest projects in the region.

Last Friday, Starkey, who joined the company 20 years ago, was sitting in the crowded office on the 19th floor of Star House juggling mobile calls as staff prepared for the final night of the Chinese New Year pyrotechnics show. (Fireworks are added for special events.) He said early in 2003 the Hong Kong government, which controlled three of the buildings Laservision chose to be part of the original concept, approached the other titleholders to commit.

``As it turned out it came just on the back of SARS and the relaunch of Hong Kong," he says. ``They all knew they had to do something and they saw this as a great opportunity." At that stage 18 of the chosen 21 buildings came on board; another 20 are expected to join by the end of this year. ``It was up to them whether they took our recommendations," Starkey says. ``The ones that didn't are paying for it now. It's noticeable.

``By utilising the lighting schemes that we've implemented, the light is not wasted into the atmosphere. It's there to light the building and that building only. It's enhancing the building and taking less light off the ambient light. They turn down that horrible incandescent floodlighting they had and go to a designed scheme.

``All the titleholders went out to tender to have the lighting installed. A couple came to us, including the spectacular Norman Foster Hong Kong Shanghai Bank , which is our flagship." Laservision designed a concept for each building, supplied the lights and $2 million worth of technology hardware all Australian made to drive the whole operation.

The question then was: how to program the show?

``The individual buildings needed a control system and it had to work across the board," Starkey says. ``The government was originally going to set up a national network, but the Bank of China and the HKSB didn't want a connection for security reasons. ``Laservision has a piece of control technology which allows all the buildings to be synchronised, but with individual elements via a digital data pump. It's a piece of hardware that's installed in each building that controls the main show and their individual shows by touch screen.

``All the information is sent out to each building by fibre optics and we have decoders set out around the buildings which can take information and send it to the lighting booster." The system logs on to the atomic clock via the internet every day and resyncs itself so all the buildings are in exact time. Each building's hardware is monitored from Sydney to make sure everything is working. If there's a problem, a technician in Sydney notifies the control room of that building.

``A nice bit of Australian technology. There's nothing like it in the world," Starkey says. It took 20 staff eight months to design the show. The cost to titleholders of creating a display and attaching the lighting to the exterior of the building ranged from $400,000 for a laser light above the tallest building in Hong Kong the 88-storey International Finance Centre to about $7.5 million for the HKSB building.

The show is accompanied by an audio track broadcast in three languages which can be accessed by dialling one of two telephone networks, or on two radio stations. It's also broadcast live to the promenade. The show has been such a crowd pleaser that Laservision has just signed a consultancy agreement for the development of the West Kowloon Cultural District, which will cover 40 hectares when it is completed in 2014.

Other projects include the Landmark Casino, near completion in Macau, tenders for two theme parks in Bangalore and Hyderabad in India and Shanghai ``wants to talk", a huge breakthrough to mainland China.

Starkey says the company has no plans to move outside Asia. ``We like to keep control of what we're doing. This installation is ours, we set it up and we run it. We're not interested in expansion for expansion's sake. ``Lots of companies want us to come on board and work together, but no. We'll sell hardware and technology, but we won't let them take over the larger installations."