Building a compact and bright 940 nm IR light source?
It is not clear from your question whether you want a small beam or a wide light source. 

When I worked in the lasergaming industry, most often a relatively low power LED was used in combination with a lens that focused the beam. The small beam uses the power very efficient to get a long range (easily 20m). 

Alternatively if you would like a wider beam, I have good experience with the small chip LEDs of 1-3W, as shown below. 



These LEDs have a very wide beam (120 degrees or so), but can still send data to a range of 10m when not focussed. 

Safety
Lasers are very focussed and I would therefore advise not to use it in an application where it can hit people. Normal IR Leds are safe for the eye as long as you don't focus them too much.
Think of the sun, if you focus the light with a lens it can burn things. The same is true for IR, except that you can not see the light.

Edit: Nightvision
For use in night vision, the most important part is finding a very sensitive camera. The 1-3W leds shown above are capable of lighting ar room well enough to view it with a (crappy) mobile phone camera wihtout IR filter. 
However, for night vision you would probably want a more focussed beam (that only lights the field of view of the camera). In that case you can either use lenses or buy an IR torch, which has a similar LED but is focussed by a reflector (e.g. IR torch).