Have You Seen This? BYU engineers help Mark Rober make the world's smallest dart blaster

Estimated read time: 1-2 minutes

This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.

THE QUANTUM REALM — Like many kids, my childhood was filled with countless Nerf battles against my friends, siblings and, occasionally, my unsuspecting parents or neighbors.

And while my friends and I often gathered after Christmas or birthdays to compare the latest and greatest in foam blasting technology, I confess I never had the creativity to dream up inventing the smallest Nerf blaster in the world.

That's probably why I'm not a viral YouTube star with tens of millions of followers like Mark Rober, who recently set out to do just that.

Rober has received more than 100 million views on several YouTube videos in which he swims in Jell-O, and tests whether sharks can really smell blood in the water, and is well known for a series of videos unleashing "glitter bomb" traps on would-be porch pirates and phone scammers.

In his latest experiment, Rober teamed up with engineering students from Brigham Young University, his alma mater, to 3D print a functioning, near-microscopic blaster.

"For about four years I've wanted to make the world's smallest Nerf gun because I have the world record for the world's largest," Rober said.

Rather than build the dozens of individual parts that go into a normal blaster, the team made a prototype from a single piece of plastic, and then scaled it down by 100 times.

I'll leave the scientific explanation to BYU's mechanical engineering experts, but the result was a blaster about the size of "two flecks of pepper," according to Rober.

"It's tiny, but it's an actual functioning, firing Nerf gun, which is so delightful," he said.