La société Huvr Tech a imaginé ce que serait une vraie planche Hoverboard tout droit sortie du film Retour vers le futur. La planche serait par exemple connectée à notre smartphone et à Bluebooth. Le concept est original mais la planche n’existe pas encore. Voici deux vidéos avec Tony Hawk ou Moby, testant la planche.
Site officiel d’HUVR Tech
Apple has teamed up with Ferrari, Volvo and Mercedes-Benz to develop software for cars allowing iPhones to be connected up and controlled via a second screen in the entertainment system.
Using Apple‘s CarPlay software, drivers will be able to use Apple Maps as in-car navigation, as well as listen to music and watch films. Additionally, calls can be made through CarPlay, which will be controlled by the Siri voice recognition platform. It’s the first time Apple has developed software explicitly for use in cars.
The system was unveiled at this week’s Geneva Motor Show, held annually in the Swiss capital.
When users connect their iPhone 5, 5c, or 5s via a USB cable, apps found on the phone appear on the vehicle’s inbuilt screens. The phone can then be controlled through the car’s controls instead of the phone’s. Apple believe it will make cars smarter and safer to drive.
“CarPlay has been designed from the ground up to provide drivers with an incredible experience using their iPhone in the car,” said Greg Joswiak, vice president of iPhone and iOS product marketing at Apple.
CarPlay accesses recent destinations looked up on your iPhone, as well as those mentioned in emails and text messages. From there, it can anticipate where you’d like to go, and then provide turn-by-turn directions, live traffic information and estimated time of arrival.
“iPhone users always want their content at their fingertips and CarPlay lets drivers use their iPhone in the car with minimised distraction,” continued Joswiak.
With its messaging service, texts will be read out via Siri, allowing the driver to reply using voice commands.
Car buyers are expected to be able to purchase vehicles equipped with Apple’s software later this year. The system will be compatible with new cars from Mercedes, Volvo and Ferrari. Honda, Hyundai and Jaguar are expected to add CarPlay-enabled cars to their ranges.
The move means developers will be able to build apps specifically for use in cars. A select number of third-party apps including Spotify, iHeartRadio and Beats Radio will be made available for the product’s launch.
The announcement by Apple brings them into direct competition with Google in the race to become the industry standard for in-car software systems. The search engine giant launched its own purpose-built Android-based car system initiative earlier this year called the Open Automotive Alliance (OAA).
Working alongside Audi, General Motors, Honda and Hyundai the OAA aims to enable developers to easily add car-specific modes to their apps.
Microsoft is also working on a similar system in partnership with Ford, making cars the latest battleground for IT giants looking to gain a foothold in a lucrative new market.
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Volvo and Mercedes-Benz appeared first on Dezeen.
L’agence de publicité suédoise Akestam Holst et la maison de production Stopp ont conçu une publicité créative et interactive pour les produits capillaires Apotek Hjärtat de la marque Apolosophy, dans le métro de Stockholm. Quand un métro passe, les cheveux de la mannequin s’envolent dans tous les sens.
A portable router designed to bring constant internet connectivity to tough locations in Sub-Saharan Africa and beyond was presented at the Design Indaba conference in Cape Town this week.
The BRCK device from Kenyan technology firm Ushahidi can automatically switch between Ethernet, WiFi and mobile broadband to maintain its connection. It has its own battery with an eight-hour life to cope with power-cuts and intermittent connections, plus a built-in 16 gigabyte hard drive.
“There’s a gap in the reliability of the infrastructure and this is our answer,” said co-founder of Ushahidi Juliana Rotich, speaking to Dezeen after her talk at Design Indaba.
For her, creating technology appropriate to the location is crucial: “Why do we use technology designed for London when we are using it in Lagos?”
Rotich described the BRCK as “a rugged way to stay connected,” adding that their mantra is: “If it works in Africa, it’ll work anywhere.”
The BRCK’s backup battery and multiple ways of connecting to the network mean that it will keep its users online even when internet connectivity and power is sporadic. From coders working in internet cafes in Nairobi to farmers working miles from large conurbations, the BRCK is designed to keep its users hooked up to the internet under the most difficult circumstances.
Weighing 500 grams the device is 132 milimetres by 72 milimetres by 45 milimetres, similar to the size of a Mac Mini. It’s designed to work in dusty locations, be physically robust and splash-proof. Up to 20 devices can be connected to its wireless network .
The device enjoyed a successful Kickstarter campaign last year and is currently being refined by the Kenyan-based design team.
Rotich hopes that the launch of BRCK can be used as a means of developing the manufacturing base in Africa, a path which will require political and economic changes, as she sees it.
“We’ve shown we can prototype and make, but we still have to pay more than 100 percent duty on components – we have to make a tough business choice,” said Rotich.
“Ultimately we would love for the BRCK to be conceived in Africa, designed in Africa, made in Africa, used in Africa – and used around the world,” she added.
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“designed to work anywhere” appeared first on Dezeen.
DataStickies, c’est un projet génial voulant réinventer le concept de clé USB, en imaginant la déclinaison des capacités en différents coloris et proposant de poser ceux-ci sur une surface ODTS, permettant le transfert de données comme s’ils s’agissaient de post-its. Un concept innovant à découvrir dans la suite.
News: NASA is developing robots made from a tensile system of interlocking rods and cables that can transform from flat components into a ball shape then tense and flex to roll around the surface of planets.
Researchers at the Intelligent Systems Division of NASA‘s Ames Research Center in California designed the Super Ball Bot robots as a more flexible and robust alternative to conventional probes, which can be damaged by the impact of landing on a planet’s surface.
“Current robot designs are delicate, requiring combinations of devices such as parachutes, retrorockets and impact balloons to minimise impact forces and to place a robot in a proper orientation,” said the research team led by Vytas SunSpiral and Adrian Agogino.
“Instead, we propose to develop a radically different robot based on a ‘tensegrity’ built purely upon tensile and compression elements.”
Constructed from a network of rods and cables that surround and protect the scientific payload at its centre, the lightweight collapsible design is developed using the principles of tensegrity pioneered by American architect and engineer Buckminster Fuller in the 1960s.
Instead of employing wheels or tracks, the robots move by using a system of motors to shorten and lengthen cables connecting the rods, which changes the balance of tension in the structure and causes it to jerk and roll across the ground.
The flexibility of the system enables the different points that touch the ground to adjust according to what they’re interacting with, allowing the robots to navigate across hills, debris and uneven terrain.
The robots could be flat-packed for transportation and unfold into a three-dimensional configuration in preparation for landing on a planet’s surface, at which point the structure would compress to absorb the energy of the impact.
“These robots can be lightweight, absorb strong impacts, are redundant against single-point failures, can recover from different landing orientations and are easy to collapse and uncollapse,” the researchers added. “We believe tensegrity robot technology can play a critical role in future planetary exploration.”
Groups of dozens or even hundreds of probes could be launched onto a planet and operate as a coordinated and interactive team to gather samples.
The scientists have constructed prototypes using poles around one metre in length to demonstrate their principles, but claim that much larger versions could be built to carry larger scientific instruments.
All images are courtesy of NASA.
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and roll across rough terrain appeared first on Dezeen.
Someone has finally taken note that throughout the day, we use our smartphones in at least two different ways. There’s the active way, where you’re futzing around with an app and your thumbs are flying across the screen. Then there’s the passive way, where you’re glancing at it to reference some piece of information you need. And with that latter usage, it would be better if the information was persistently presented, not something you had to call up by doing a home-button-press/swipe/access-code-enter/app-button-press.
Thus Russian tech manufacturer Yota Devices produces the Yota Phone, billed as “The world’s first dual-screen, always-on smartphone.” While one side has got the familiar color touchscreen we’re all familiar with, flip the thing over and there’s a black-and-white, EPD electronic-ink-type display that draws no power once its pixels are in place. (The image or text will stay “burned” there even if the phone’s battery dies.) In other words you send whatever data you want to that second screen and it stays there, ready for immediate viewing when you pull the phone out of your bag, no button presses necessary. If I owned this phone I’d constantly avail myself of the convenience of having a grocery list, boarding pass, map snippet, reference dimensions, addresses and appointment times, etc.
First gen: Square-ish
Après sa dernière série « Flower Explosions », le photographe Martin Klimas nous offre une expérience consistant à déposer de la peinture fraîche sur un haut-parleur, puis de faire fonctionner celui-ci à pleine puissance, et enfin de saisir l’instant avec son appareil photo. Un résultat orignal, graphique et créatif.
L’artiste japonais Jun Kitagawa installe des fermetures à glissière géantes dans des lieux publics à travers le Japon. Les œuvres d’art en 2D et 3D sont apparus dans les bâtiments, sur les murs, et dans les étangs révélant un coté mystérieux de ce qui se trouve sous la surface de ces fermetures éclaires entrouvertes.
Dezeen and MINI Frontiers: wearable technology will revolutionise healthcare for doctors and patients alike, says the director of design studio Vitamins in our final movie from December’s Wearable Futures conference.
“In the future there’s no doubt that wearable technologies are going to be part of our everyday lives,” says Duncan Fitzsimons of Vitamins. Increased usage of personal health-monitoring devices will be one example of this, he says, making the “the doctor-patient relationship change [for the] better”.
Fitzsimons explains how the current constraints on an appointment between patient and doctor – lack of time and lack of information – can be mitigated by personal monitoring devices that collect patient data over a long period of time.
“When we are ill at the moment we only see the doctor for a very small amount of time. This is just a snapshot in the progress of your illness,” he says.
“If [a doctor] has access to a wider amount of data, they’ll be able to see how your illness has started, progressed and perhaps is tailing off,” he continues. “That will enable them to have a lot more information to diagnose you better and also enable you to have a more transparent window into your health so that you can understand it better as well.”
For these benefits to be realised, Fitzsimons says the technology to record this data needs to be attractive and easy to use, citing two examples of products by healthcare company Qardio: the QardioArm, which measures blood pressure and the QardioCore, a wearable ECG (electrocardiogram) monitoring device, commonly used to detect abnormal heart rhythms. Both are designed, says Fitzsimons, to look unlike medical devices and use a smartphone as the interface with the patient.
[The above paragraph was amended on 27 February 2014. Previously, it was stated that Vitamins would be launching the QardioArm and QardioCore products.]
Fitzsimons is the co-founder of Vitamins, the design studio which last year won the transport category at the Design Museum Designs of the Year 2013 awards for its Folding Wheel project.
This is the fifth and final movie from the two-day Wearable Futures conference that explored how smart materials and new technologies are helping to make wearable technology one of the most talked-about topics in the fields of design and technology.
In the first movie, designer of Dita von Teese’s 3D-printed gown Francis Bitonti explained how advances in design software mean “materials are becoming media”. In the second, Suzanne Lee explained how she makes clothes “grown using bacteria.” In the third, Shamees Aden explained how scientists are combining non-living chemicals to create materials with the properties of living organisms. In the fourth, Pauline van Dongen called for wearable technology to “transcend the world of gadgets”.
The music featured in the movie is a track by DJ Kimon. You can listen to his music on Dezeen Music Project.
Dezeen and MINI Frontiers is a year-long collaboration with MINI exploring how design and technology are coming together to shape the future.
The post Wearable technology will “transform
the doctor-patient relationship” appeared first on Dezeen.
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