Depending on where you are, mask wearing is either standard practice or… choose your own adventure.
And while you can’t physically force someone to don a mask, you can apparently come close -- and that’s what YouTuber Allen Pan must have had in mind when he developed his latest gadget.
Pan is the face behind the YouTube channel “Sufficiently Advanced,” which sets out to make pretend things real -- like taser nerf darts and actual, burning light sabers. Don’t try this at home, but DO join his million followers in watching his insane exploits because they’re pretty cool.
For his latest video, Pan was inspired by the lack of mask wearing he was seeing in his day-to-day, so he set out to create a gun-like device that could actually launch them onto people’s faces.
The result was a pneumatic launcher that uses a CO2 canister, solenoid valve and brake line attached to the pistol grip of a paint sprayer. The masks attach to the deployment device with magnets, and they are intended to wrap straps around the wearer once they arrive on… the face.
Pan did some testing on Huntington Beach -- on dummies, not people -- and, from a practical standpoint, this might not quite be the solution. As Engadget points out, “shooting projectiles at someone’s face is never super safe.”
