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Air-Hair is a “virtual reality haircut simulator” from the Tokyo Institute of Technology, although it looks like that virtual reality is more Lawnmower Man than… whatever good virtual reality is.
Instead of visiting the Eiffel Tower, eating cheese and taking thé when you visit France next, consider instead a retreat at the exclusive virtual-racing I-WAY building in Lyon, France.
Sitting in the typical recliner has become the weeknight sex of the furniture world—a comfortable task for your body while your mind focuses on TV. The Soyuz Chair hopes to break the mundanity with vintage Soviet space craft design.
Here’s the new Volvo in-house wind tunnel simulator, a 28 million dollar facility that is the first in its class to have a road simulator. In theory, it will allow the Swedish manufacturer to precisely test the effect of road changes and airflows all around the car to make cars more fuel efficient. Strangely enough, Tim Walker, the aerodynamics expert at Volvo Cars, doesn’t mention other possible uses, like drying the hair and bodies of a multitude of lusty valkyries and/or vikings just out of the shower:
newVideoPlayer("/airtraffic_gizmodo.flv", 520, 280,""); Here’s a video displaying all commercial air traffic in the world during a 24-hour period. Seriously, I’m moving to New York City tomorrow and seeing the flight density in this computer simulation scares me a bit. Thankfully, it’s a big planet with plenty of space to fly. But then, pilot friends tell me that sometimes they get close enough to wave at each other, so maybe it’s not as big as to accommodate the 7.4 billion passengers that will travel by air in 2020. [Zhaw via Dark Roasted Blend]
newVideoPlayer("/ibird.flv", 506, 304,""); The iBird Flight Simulator was easily the most creative demo at Microsoft’s Research Summit yesterday. Also developed in conjunction with NYU (like the UnMouse Pad), it uses a USB controller with dual retractable, pulley-style cords, the iBird tracks your movement in 3D space.. The iBird then relays that information back to the computer and offers visual feedback in the form of a projected 3D world where you become a bird that flaps, leans and speeds up.
It’s the sort of thing you’d expect ordered by Wile E. Coyote from an ACME catalog. But instead, it’s a product for the Hurricane Research Centre to prepare for the devastating natural disasters. Six giant gasoline-powered fans drive winds at well over 160kph in a wall of moving air that’s large enough to engulf an entire single-story building. Read on for a shot of the quarantined destruction:
Philippe Kahn and his ambitious Pacific Cup sailing trip from San Francisco to Hawai’i got me all inspired this week to go sailing, but there’s one problem: I suck at sailing. In fact, the last time I went sailing was in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, where I almost got smashed on the reef that protects the beach there. So you’ll excuse my excitement today over the SimSail, a full sized “land yachting” simulator for two. It’s not quite the same thing as sailing on the water, and it’s certainly not even remotely close to what Kahn’s up to these days, but for me, at least, it’s a start.
