The serious use by militaries against pilots has been an issue for many years, as I pointed out in my contribution to this thread three years ago. And that was written almost 15 years after I had worked on the problem myself. and I was a Johnny-come-lately to it. This has been an acknowledged military issue for decades now.
as I said at the time, there are countermeasures – absorbant dyes mixed into the injection-molded plastic helmets, holographic and diffraction grating filters, and even more exotic defenses based on dyes meant to absorb light that gets too bright, or scatterers meant to diffuse it away.
They already have countermeasures in place for the more common wavelengths (which include all those laser pointer wavelengths) and had some systems in place for countering bright light blinding and dazzling at any wavelength even then. Things have progressed since (I hope).
that it’s making the news now is just a sign of its current practical use, and of the time delay between the problem and public perception of it.
I mean, there’s no fundamental problem with mounting lasers to shark’s heads, but the reason it isn’t done is that, although it might be FREAKIN’ AWESOME!, there’s no money in it.
If you wanna dance with the Laser Shark, you gotta Pay the Piper. Or the Optical Engineer-cum-Shark Veterinarian.
Seems like the same technology used in auto-darkening welding helmets should work perfectly: detect bright light, switch lens to high-absorption mode in milliseconds.
Auto-darkening goggles work by using Liquid Crystals in collaboration with polarizers. I’m not sure that would stand up to a direct laser hit, although it would probably eliminate dazzle. For laboratory laser safety goggles you want optical density of about 6. Higher would be better if your laser was out to get you. Welding glasses use their own “shade numbers” for darkness that don’t match optical densities. The rule is that the Shade Number is 1 plus 97/3) the optical density. a Shade Number of 13 (pretty high) thus translates to Optical Density of 5 (letting through 0.00001 of the incident light, or 0.0001%)
For al I know they’re using this method right now, with darker and more robust materials – as I say, I haven’t worked in this for a while. But you want to be sure that you have a lot of dark at the wavelengths you expect to be thrown at you.