How can people survive in a hostile environment during drought conditions? A new device developed by scientists based at MIT offers an ingenious way of producing water — literally — out of thin air. The principle behind it is simple: what if there was a way to collect the water vapor present in the air and collect it — and, in turn, bring water to places without any rainfall in weeks or months?

“We have built a meter-scale device that we hope to deploy in resource-limited regions, where even a solar cell is not very accessible,” explained MIT professor Xuanhe Zhao in a statement. The device uses a type of hydrogel — resembling, according to MIT’s announcement, “black bubble wrap” — that collects water and then transfers it to a glass surface. Once there, it can be directed towards a storage container and collected.

In order to test the device, the scientists placed it in Death Valley for over a week; even when conditions were at their driest, the device was still able to collect some water from the air. The scientists involved in the device’s development wrote more about the process behind it in a paper published this month in Nature Water.

In an article for Live Science, Damien Pine noted some of the other innovations that play a part in this device’s design, notably the way the scientists used glycerol to make sure that the water collected was safe to drink. Pine reports that the people behind this device hope to bring it to more dry locations in the future to continue their research. Could this prototype help bring more water to a drier world? Stay tuned.