Chinese company tries to sell a laser turret that shoots down mosquitoes

Photon Matrix Lab, based in Changzhou in China’s Jiangsu province, has developed the Laser Mosquito Air Defense System, a roughly brick-sized device that combines lidar, cameras and artificial intelligence to locate small flying objects. According to Xataka, it emits about 100,000 low-power laser pulses per second, calculates a target’s trajectory and fires a higher-power laser to burn the mosquito’s wings; each shot lasts about one-hundredth of a second.

The company offers a version with an invisible infrared laser, mainly intended for indoor use, for US$988, and another with a visible blue laser for outdoor use at US$1,088. The concept dates back to Photonic Fence, a project presented by Nathan Myhrvold and engineers in the United States in 2009 and publicly demonstrated in 2010, but it never reached the mass consumer market.