In this work, diverse hollow unnopartieles of metal oxides and sulfides were prepared by simply laser ablating metal targets in properly chosen liquids. The Kirkendall voiding and the selective heating with an infrared laser were shown to work as two independent mechanisms for the formation of such hollow nanoparticles in only one- or two-step synthesis approaches. One of the prepared materials, ZnS hollow nanoparticles, showed high performance in gas sensing. The simple. last. inexpensive technique that is proposed demonstrates very promising perspectives.