Hasta La Ideas

Dezeen and MINI Frontiers: augmented and virtual reality visualisation technologies will soon be combined in one device, says Andy Millns of 3D production company Inition in the final part of our interview. 

“I think augmented reality and virtual reality will essentially converge into the same thing”, says Millns.

The co-founder of Inition explains that the next generation of appliances will blur the once-clear distinction between augmented technology devices like Google Glass and virtual reality devices like the Oculus Rift headset.

“There’s two strains of headsets: the Google Glass-type which only gives you a small image in the corner of your field of view.” says Millns, referring to Google’s augmented reality spectacles which can overlay digital information like maps and internet searches into the user’s field of vision.

“The other strain is the Oculus Rift type, which is designed to replace the entire world and give you a high resolution and the biggest picture possible.” says Millns, referring to the strap-on motion-responsive virtual reality googles from Oculus VR.

“Eventually those two things will converge [into] some sort of contact lens which goes in your eye and does both of those things. It will give you a huge image at high resolution but also the ability to see through and mix images with the real world”, says Millns.

Millns also predicts that the integration between displays and humans will become tighter and tighter, leading to what he calls a “cyborg situation where you have something embedded inside your brain that has a direct interface to your visual cortex.”

This is the third in a series of interviews with Millns. In the first he predicted that advances in virtual reality will “blur the line between what’s virtual and what’s real” and in the second he discussed how augmented reality technology will revolutionise the way we navigate cities.

The music featured in the movie is a track by Floyd Lavine. You can listen to Lavine’s music on Dezeen Music Project. Contact lens image is courtesy of Shutterstock.

Dezeen and MINI Frontiers  is a year-long collaboration with MINI exploring how design and technology are coming together to shape the future.

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will converge in digital “contact lens” appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen and MINI Frontiers: in our first movie looking at the interface between design and technology, Andy Millns of 3D production company Inition claims virtual reality will soon become almost indistinguishable from the real world. 

Based in Shoreditch, east London, Inition specialises in using new technologies such as virtual reality to create a range of experiences and installations.

“Virtual reality was the technology that set me off on this career path in the first place,” says Millns. “I was absolutely obsessed with virtual reality in the early nineties; now it’s very exciting that the hardware has finally got to the point where the experience matches people’s expectations.”

The studio has been working with the developer version of Oculus Rift, a virtual reality headset that was announced on crowd-funding website Kickstarter in 2012. The consumer version is currently in development and expected to launch this year.

“Oculus Rift has been sort of the poster child for virtual reality,” says Millns, before going on to explain how straightforward the device is. “What you’ve got essentially is a seven-inch mobile phone-type screen and two lenses. It’s that simple.”

The developer version of Oculus Rift has a very low-resolution screen, but with the pixel density of mobile phone screens rapidly increasing, Millns says it won’t be long before virtual reality becomes as life-like as the real world.

“We’re going to see this year a headset where it’s starting to get quite difficult to distinguish whether you’re actually wearing a headset or not,” he says. “When we start to get super-high-resolution headsets with the type of display technology that we’re seeing on the market now, it’s gong to blur the line between what is reality and what is virtual.”

It’s most recent project using the Oculus Rift device was a collaboration with the fashion designer Gareth Pugh called Monolith, which was installed last month at Selfridges for the London department store’s Festival of Imagination.

Visitors entered a soundproofed booth and put on a special helmet, which transported them on a virtual reality journey through monochromatic cityscapes populated by ghostly figures based on the sculptural costumes Pugh created for the Royal Ballet.

“You walk into the store, put the headset on and you’re immersed in a three-minute experience inside the world of Gareth Pugh,” Millns explains.

The music featured in the movie is a track by Floyd Lavine. You can listen to Lavine’s music on Dezeen Music Project.

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line between what’s virtual and what’s real” appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: in this movie filmed at Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven, artist Gijs van Bon shows us his machine called Skryf, which deposits a trail of sand behind it to form letters on the ground. 

Skryf consists of an adapted CNC milling machine on wheels, which van Bon controls with a laptop via a simple piece of software he developed.

“I can just type in text and it converts it to a code that the machine accepts,” he explains. “It writes letter by letter and in the four hours that I write per day it will write about 160 metres.”

Van Bon travels to different festivals around the world with Skryf and chooses new pieces of literature to write on the ground in each place.

“I’ve been with Skryf throughout Europe and once to Australia,” he explains. “In Eindhoven, I’m writing the poems of Merel Morre. She is the city poet of Eindhoven; she reflects on what is happening now in the city.”

Skryf’s carefully-written lines of poetry are destroyed by passersby or the wind almost as quickly as it can write them. Van Bon says that the whole idea behind the project is that the lines of poetry exist only momentarily.

“When you’re writing one [line of] text, another one is going away because people start walking through it,” he explains. “Once I’ve finished writing, I walk the same way back but it’s all destroyed. It’s ephemeral, it’s just for this moment and afterwards it’s left to the public and to the wind.”

We drove around Eindhoven in our MINI Cooper S Paceman. The music in the movie is a track called Family Music by Eindhoven-based hip hop producer Y’Skid.

You can listen to more music by Y’Skid on Dezeen Music Project and watch more of our Dezeen and MINI World Tour movies here.

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poems on the ground with sand” appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: the penultimate stop on our Dezeen and MINI World tour is Eindhoven. In our first video report from the city, co-founder of Dutch Design Week Miriam van der Lubbe explains how the small industrial town has become one of the leading centres for design and technology in the world.

“Eindhoven is actually a very small city compared to the big capitals in Europe or the world,” says van der Lubbe. “It’s a group of about seven villages that grew together into Eindhoven.”

It is also not a very pretty one. “The centre of Eindhoven really got destroyed [during the Second World War],” Van der Lubbe explains. “They built it up in the fifties and it became a really ugly city. In Eindhoven, it can only get better.”

Despite its size, the city has been a site for technological innovation since the industrial revolution, thanks almost entirely to Dutch electronics giant Philips.

The company was founded in Eindhoven in 1891 and, although it moved its headquarters to Amsterdam in 1997, its blue logo still adorns many of the buildings in the city.

Once Philips moved out, many people were afraid Eindhoven would become a “non-area”, Van der Lubbe says. In fact, the creative industries were quick to take advantage of the large amounts of cheap space Philips left behind.

One example Van der Lubbe takes us to is Strijp, a former Philips industrial complex that is now one of the central areas of Dutch Design Week.

“Strijp is a major part of Eindhoven centre actually,” says Van der Lubbe. “The owner of Strijp bought these industrial buildings and gave them to the creative people.”

An abundance of designers ready to take up these former industrial spaces graduate each year from Design Academy Eindhoven, which has gained a reputation as one of the foremost design schools in the world.

Former students include Hella Jongerius, Marcel Wanders and Tord Boontje and many graduates, such as Piet Hein Eek plus Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farrasin of Formafantasma, choose to stay in the city.

Van der Lubbe, herself a Design Academy Eindhoven alumni, shares a studio in nearby Geldrop with fellow academy graduate Niels van Eijk.

“It grew out of Philips, because they saw that design was an important aspect of products,” she says of the school.

“It used to be that as soon as people graduated they left. But now they’re coming back because they see that there’s something going on here that’s interesting.”

There is still an emphasis on science and technology in Eindhoven. Van der Lubbe takes us to the High Tech Campus on the outskirts of the city, where many technology companies are based, as well as Eindhoven University of Technology.

Having design, industry, science and technology in such close proximity is the key to Eindhoven’s success, says Van der Lubbe.

“There is a huge opportunity for Eindhoven because it has all these aspects in it,” she says. “It has the academic world, it has science, it has the creative world, it definitely has industry.”

“The potential of what is here is just starting to come out and there is so much more that can actually happen here. I really believe that.”

We drove around Eindhoven in our MINI Cooper S Paceman. The music in the movie is a track called Family Music by Eindhoven-based hip hop producer Y’Skid.

You can listen to more music by Y’Skid on Dezeen Music Project and watch more of our Dezeen and MINI World Tour movies here.

The post “Eindhoven has design, it has science
and it has industry” appeared first on Dezeen.

News: Dutch designer Daan Roosegaarde has developed an “electronic vacuum cleaner” that can remove smog from urban skies and is working with the mayor of Beijing to use the technology in a new park in the city (+ interview + movie).

The concept uses buried coils of copper to create an electrostatic field that attracts smog particles, creating a void of clean air above it.

“You can purify the air so you can breathe again,” Roosegaarde told Dezeen in an exclusive interview during Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven. “It creates these holes of 50-60 metres of clean air so you can see the sun again.”

Roosegaarde’s company Studio Roosegaarde has signed a memorandum of understanding with the mayor of Beijing to create a public park to showcase the technology.

The authorities in Beijing are finally admitting the huge problems caused by smog. This weekend the Beijing Environmental Monitoring Center warned children, the elderly and those with heart and breathing problems to stay indoors due to extreme levels of pollutants in the air.

Working with scientists at the University of Delft, Roosegaarde created a working prototype of the project last week. “We have a 5×5 metre room full of smog where we created a smog-free hole of one cubic metre,” he said. “And now the question is to apply it in public spaces.”

The buried copper coils produce a weak electrostatic field that extends into the sky above. Smog particles are drawn down towards the ground, punching a clean hole in the air and allowing the particles to be collected. The coils can be buried beneath the grass of a park and are completely safe.

“It’s a similar principle to if you have a statically charged balloon that attracts your hair,” Roosegaarde explained. “If you apply that to smog, to create fields of static electricity of ions, which literally attract or magnetise the smog so it drops down so you can clean it, like an electronic vacuum cleaner.”

Roosegaarde had the idea for the project while staying at a hotel in Beijing and looking at OMA’s CCTV building from his window. “I saw the CCTV building,” he said. “I had a good day when I could see it and I had a bad day when I could not see it. On a bad day the smog is completely like a veil. You don’t see anything. I thought, that’s interesting, that’s a design problem.”

Roosegaarde’s team will now spend up to 18 months developing the technology before starting work on the ground in Beijing.

Here’s the text of the interview between Dezeen editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs and Daan Roosegaarde:

Marcus Fairs: Tell us about the smog project.

Daan Roosegaarde: As you may know I hop from obsession to obsession, from fashion to highways to a problem we have right now which is smog. So it’s weird, because in a way we as human beings have always developed tools to enable ourselves. Wheels are an extension of our legs; glasses are an extension of our eyes; we developed cars to travel around.

But the weird thing in China, where growth is going so fast, is that these machines are striking back. They create side effects that we never thought about, which is pollution, which is smog. And Beijing is getting so incredibly worse that the American Embassy had to buy a new meter, because it was hitting the top all the time.

Marcus Fairs: How did the project come about?

Daan Roosegaarde: I was in a hotel in Beijing where I saw the CCTV building. I had a good day when I could see it and I had a bad day when I could not see it. On a bad day the smog is completely like a veil. You don’t see anything. I thought, that’s interesting, that’s a design problem. We could use smog as a material to design with, to draw.

Marcus Fairs: How does it work?

Daan Roosegaarde: We learned a lot from the Crystal project we’ve done in Eindhoven, which uses static electro-magnetic fields of ions. It’s a similar principle to if you have a statically charged balloon that attracts your hair.

If you apply that to smog, to create fields of static electricity of ions, which literally attract or magnetise the smog so it drops down so you can clean it, like an electronic vacuum cleaner. You can purify the air so you can breathe again. And it creates these holes of 50-60 metres of clean air so you can see the sun again.

So we teamed up with the Technical University of Delft, with a smog expert, and he said the technology is possible, so we have a big indoor prototype working. And I spoke to the mayor of Beijing who, when the microphone is turned off, admits they have a big problem, and so they are investing in making it happen.

The idea is to make a park in Beijing where you will see the old world and the new world. We’ll drag nature in. It’s Dutch landscape design in a most radical way.

It’s similar to how static electricity works, where you create a field. By electrifying particles they gravitate and fall down. It’s similar to how they spray-paint metal onto surface [by a process known as vacuum metallisation, in which electrostatically charged metal particles are attracted to the surface of an object, creating a metallic surface on it].

Marcus Fairs: Could this be a solution to smog in future?

Daan Roosegaarde: It could be a first step in creating awareness of how bad it really is. Because you see the difference really clearly. Of course the real solution lies in dealing with reality in a different way; it’s a human problem not a technological problem. But for sure my goal would be to apply it to parks, to public spaces which are for everyone, where people can meet and enjoy life again.

Marcus Fairs: What does the device look like?

Daan Roosegaarde: It’s copper coils that we put in the ground and put grass over them so you don’t see it. It sounds a bit dangerous but it’s pacemaker-safe, you can walk through it, the electric field is quite low. It’s an induction thing similar to how your toothbrush gets charged.

Marcus Fairs: How high can it reach?

Daan Roosegaarde: That’s what we’re testing now. The smog is quite low, which is good, especially in Beijing. Basically the more energy you put in it, the higher you can get. It’s high voltage, low ampere, and the more power you put in the more smog you can attract.

Marcus Fairs: If you switch it on would you see the smog suddenly disappear into the ground?

Daan Roosegaarde: Yes. You would literally see it on the ground. What I would like to do is capture all that smog and then compress it. So for example you could make a smog ring of all the smog in a cubic kilometre. It would show the reality and question why we accept it.

Marcus Fairs: Have you tested it?

Daan Roosegaarde: Yes. We have a 5×5 metre room full of smog where we created a smog-free hole of one cubic metre. And that happened this week. And now the question is to apply it in public spaces.

Marcus Fairs: Is the Beijing project going to happen?

Daan Roosegaarde: Yes. We signed a memorandum of understanding to do it. They just launched [another] project, a €2.3 million project to purify air, to reduce cars, more cycling. But it’s peanuts. It’s not going to work.

Marcus Fairs: How much does your concept cost?

Daan Roosegaarde: The research and development is the biggest hurdle as always. It will take another 12-15 months with a good team of people to make it work, to make it safe. But we know it’s possible and you know me by now: I have a scientist who says it’s possible, you have me, a designer who creates the imagination and you have a client who is desperate. And now all we have to do is find the “merge” button. It’s a new challenge.

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could solve smog problem appeared first on Dezeen.