We always see cool tools in video games that we wish we had in real life, like gravity gloves, contraction rays, and grappling hooks. But every once in a while, the opposite happens. Sometimes we see real-life tools that look as if they belong in a video game.

Take Dyson's new vacuum cleaner, the Dyson V15 Detect, for example, which has a ridiculous laser beam. When you push the vacuum cleaner, a "precisely angled laser" illuminates the dust and debris on the floor in front of you. And not just ordinary dust! Because James Dyson wages a never-ending battle against filth, even against tiny dust mites that are invisible to the naked eye.

If a laser searching for debris doesn't sound too video-gamey, this vacuum cleaner counts and measures the debris it sucks up and displays it on a color-coded LCD screen. Yellow for allergens, orange for microscopic particles, pink for dust mites, purple for "sugar and fleas," and so on. [Especially the phrase "sugar and fleas," because we don't want to think about that for a second. However, it seems certain that this is the kind of tool that would appear in games like "Internal Cleanup Detail" or "Slime Launcher."

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

And I find this statement more than a little frightening. It is not hard to imagine that Dyson's dust-hating algorithm will one day come to its senses and conclude that it is not dust that needs to be eliminated, but humans who are the masters of dust. A filthy, disgusting, dusty human being. And the next thing you know, the mountaintop opens up, the towering Dyson Death Vacuum soars into the sky, the world is enveloped in a sickening green light, and the entire human race is sucked up and disposed of (and counted).

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

Thanks, Engadget.