Man builds Iron Man-style palm-mounted laser weapon

By Andrew Couts July 22, 2011

laser-glove-mk-iii — Image used with permission by copyright holder

No matter how old you get, lasers will always be awesome. It’s just a rule of nature, like gravity or road rage or loving lasers. So it is our privilege — nay, our duty — to deliver to you one of the most supremely sweet home laser projects we’ve ever had the privilege to encounter: the Laser Glove MK III.

Designed by German lab technician Patrick Priebe, and based on Iron Man’s weaponry, the Laser Glove MK III truly looks like something out of science fiction. C-shaped, and worn on the hand so that the laser points directly out of the palm, the Laser Glove sports a 1000 mW 445nm laser diode, which is powerful enough to blind someone instantly. (Other than that, it lights matches, pops balloons and looks sweet.)

Powered by two lithium-ion batters that are housed on the back of the glove, the MK III runs on just 7.4 volts of electricity. According to Hack a Day, this still makes the laser “just as powerful as the WickedLasers Spyder 3 Arctic – THE benchmark in portable handheld lasers” We did find a video of the Dragon Lasers Spartan beating the Spyder 3 Arctic, so that might be the benchmark. But what do we know? In short, Priebe’s Iron Man creation is brilliantly made, at least as far as anyone can see.

Priebe has hidden most of the information about the build from the public eye, as any good mad scientist should. We do know that he was wise enough to make the innards of his MK III entirely out of 2mm-thick brass. This creative design gives Priebe’s weapon — the third iteration of the device — a massive heat sink, which absorbs the heat created by the laser, allowing it to run for an impressive three minutes straight before needing to cool down.

Topics

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Features Editor for Digital Trends, Andrew Couts covers a wide swath of consumer technology topics, with particular focus on…

Computing

This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio

acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

News

Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards

Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

News

Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards

Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.