What is the common name for the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device?

The Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device is commonly called the portal gun. It is the central tool in Portal, allowing the player to create linked portals on suitable flat surfaces.

The device normally produces two portal ends, one blue and one orange. Neither portal is permanently an entrance or exit: anything entering one emerges from the other. This lets Chell cross gaps, reach elevated platforms, redirect objects, and solve puzzles that would otherwise be impossible.

Portal’s physics also preserve momentum through the portal connection. A classic technique is to fall through a portal placed on the floor, gain speed, and emerge from a wall portal to launch across a gap. The game’s puzzles are built around combining this movement with switches, weighted objects, energy pellets, and other testing equipment.

The portal gun is not the same as Half-Life’s gravity gun or Gordon Freeman’s crowbar. Its formal name appears in Aperture Science’s terminology, while “portal gun” is the widely used short name among players and in the Portal series’ broader cultural vocabulary.