JetLev jetpack finally goes on sale

By Trevor Mogg November 18, 2011

It’s been a while coming, but Raymond Li and his fellow engineers are finally in a position to bring their water-powered jetpack to the commercial market, turning the ultimate childhood fantasy into reality for millions around the world. Well, maybe not millions. You see, the jetpack will set you back $100,000.

For those who can afford it, the JetLev R200 will be available in spring 2012 with the company already taking orders via its website.

The jetpack is powered by water pumped at more than 1,000 gallons per minute from a 200-horsepower marine engine up a 10-meter hose – connected to you (or your jetpack, to be precise). It’s the thrust of the water gushing out of two ground-facing nozzles coming out of the jetpack that enables you to take to the skies.

Image used with permission by copyright holder

This means, of course, that you can only fly over water. This is just as well though, because if things take a turn for the worse mid-flight, you’d much rather land on a soft watery-type substance than a rock hard concrete-type substance, right? Fortunately the pack on your back also doubles as a flotation device, so when you do return to the Earth’s surface, you’ll have no worries about drowning.

The JetLev jetpack is capable of speeds of up to 25 mph at a height of nine meters and can travel for a distance of 80 miles.

Florida-based Li says on his website that he first came up with the idea for a water-powered jetpack 11 years ago. Since then, the Chinese-born Canadian has dedicated himself to developing the R200, which has involved “numerous prototype iterations, dozens of test pilots, hundreds of flights, thousands of hours and countless modifications.”

The part that concerns me is the “dozens of test pilots” bit. Why so many? What happened to them all? Let’s just hope they’re all safe and well and didn’t succumb to some unfortunate jetpack-related calamity during a test flight one afternoon.

Take a look at a demonstration of the JetLev R200 below. It has to be said, those flying the jetpack in the video make it look very easy, though unfortunately you’ll have to fork out $100,000 to find out for yourself…

[via Mashable]

Editors' Recommendations

Topics

Emerging Tech

Contributing Editor

Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…

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.

Entertainment

AI turned Breaking Bad into an anime — and it’s terrifying

Split image of Breaking Bad anime characters.

These days, it seems like there's nothing AI programs can't do. Thanks to advancements in artificial intelligence, deepfakes have done digital "face-offs" with Hollywood celebrities in films and TV shows, VFX artists can de-age actors almost instantly, and ChatGPT has learned how to write big-budget screenplays in the blink of an eye. Pretty soon, AI will probably decide who wins at the Oscars.

Within the past year, AI has also been used to generate beautiful works of art in seconds, creating a viral new trend and causing a boon for fan artists everywhere. TikTok user @cyborgism recently broke the internet by posting a clip featuring many AI-generated pictures of Breaking Bad. The theme here is that the characters are depicted as anime characters straight out of the 1980s, and the result is concerning to say the least. Depending on your viewpoint, Breaking Bad AI (my unofficial name for it) shows how technology can either threaten the integrity of original works of art or nurture artistic expression.
What if AI created Breaking Bad as a 1980s anime?
Playing over Metro Boomin's rap remix of the famous "I am the one who knocks" monologue, the video features images of the cast that range from shockingly realistic to full-on exaggerated. The clip currently has over 65,000 likes on TikTok alone, and many other users have shared their thoughts on the art. One user wrote, "Regardless of the repercussions on the entertainment industry, I can't wait for AI to be advanced enough to animate the whole show like this."