Dyson's new laser-equipped vacuum tallies up dust kill counts like a videogame

(Image credit: Dyson)

We're always coming across cool tools in videogames that we wish we could have in real life, like gravity gloves, shrink rays, and grappling hooks. But every now and then the opposite happens: we see a real-life tool that looks like it belongs in a videogame.

Take Dyson's new vacuum, the Dyson V15 Detect, which has a frickin' laser beam on it. As you push the vacuum, a "precisely-angled laser" illuminates dust and dirt particles on the floor in front of you. And not just regular dust! Even microscopic particles get lit up by the laser, because James Dyson's unending war on filth will be waged even against innocent little bystanding dust mites you can't actually see with the naked eye.

If dirt-seeking lasers don't sound videogamey enough for you, the vacuum also counts and measures the particles it sucks up, displaying them on a color-coded LCD screen for you like its racking up kills. It indexes the dust in microns, separating them into a graph: yellow for allergens, orange for microscopic particles, pink for dust mites, and purple for "sugar and fleas."

That's a level of detail I can't imagine needing or wanting, especially because I don't want to think about the phrase "sugar and fleas" for even a second. But it definitely sounds like the sort of tool you'd get in a game like Viscera Cleanup Detail or Slime Rancher.

"We spent five years refining this into an algorithm," Dyson says about the dust-counting technology in this demonstration video.

And I've gotta say, that fills me with some small amount of dread. It's not hard to imagine Dyson's dust-hating algorithm someday becoming self-aware and reaching the conclusion that it's not the dust that needs to be eliminated, but the makers of the dust: human beings. Filthy, disgusting, dusty humans. And then next thing you know, a mountaintop is opening up and the towering Dyson DeathVacuum raises into the sky, the world is bathed in a sickening green glow, and all of humanity is sucked up and disposed of (and counted).

Or, maybe it's just an expensive new vacuum (prices start at $700) and not the end of all life as we know it. Could go either way.

Thanks, Engadget.

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.