Please Explain This Lighting Technoloogy To Me (and is it new?)

Factual Questions
1

Note the projections on Cinderella Castle in this pic: dull hosted at ImgBB — ImgBB Notice that the transition between one color and the next is kind of … dull (for lack of a better choice of words).

Now note this one: holiday-projections-cinderella-castle-magic-kingdom-5-1-469x625 hosted at ImgBB — ImgBB See how … crisp the different colors are?

This seems to be a somewhat new thing in terms of lighting up tourist attractions. Is this a new technology? And how does it work? Is it just a movie projector writ large?

2

Yep, it’s just an HD projector. That allows patterns to be projected, not just color washes. You can even animate them:

The projectors are pretty large (the ones I saw being used to animate the desert at the Botanical Gardens for “Electric Desert” a few years ago are maybe 4’x4’x3’).