According to internal polling data that I just made up, the average OhGizmo reader has 16.03 gadgets. That’s a lot, and since most if not all of them require electricity to operate, it’s important to mooch as much of it from other people as possible. The extension cord that you have plugged into your neighbor’s garage can only handle so much current, but soon there may be a way to steal electric power from someone who isn’t expecting it and won’t come after you with a weed whacker: the water company.
This little device gets stuck onto the end of a faucet or inserted into an existing water pipe. It’s got a little hydroelectric turbine in it, and when water moves through, the turbine spins to charge a battery. You can then plug into the battery to charge stuff. It’s not completely free, of course… You’re taking advantage of either gravity or a water company pump somewhere, and you’ll pay for your electricity with a reduction in water pressure caused by the resistance of the turbine. But hey, if you don’t overthink it, it’s free [minuscule amounts of] electricity!
Needless to say, there’s no information on production, but I bet whatever it would cost would be the equivalent of a whoooole bunch of kilowatt-hours of electricity out of a socket.
Who really cares about a laptop with a bigger screen or more horsepower or an SSD or 4G or WiMax when you could have a laptop with an integrated make up kit and nail printer and a screen that turns into a mirror at the push of a button? Because that’s what girls want, right? Right? Hmm, maybe we need a female writer on staff or something, because I suddenly feel like I’ve dug myself into a pretty deep hole here. Just keep in mind that these HP laptop concepts were designed by a guy in Russia named Nikita Buyanov and not me… A couple more, after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »
A few months ago we brought you the Light Lane concept which attaches to the back of a bike creating a virtual light-up lane on the road’s surface, supposedly making riding at night a bit safer. Well the Contrail is a similar idea, but better suited for daytime rides. The concept was created by Studio Gelardi, and it consists of a small apparatus that applies a thin layer of colored chalk to a bike’s tire. As you ride, the chalk is transferred to the road, leaving a colorful trail behind you. Over time these trails on the road get more pronounced, which not only encourages other bikers to take the same route, but it also lets drivers know what roads are frequented with bike traffic, hopefully making them a bit more cautious.
Didn’t get the response you were hoping for from the last text message you sent? With these Cell Stickies, created by Fiona Carswell, you can just peel off a response, attach it to your cellphone’s screen and see the reply you really wanted. As Fiona puts it, “For people who go to great lengths to see what they want to see…”
They unfortunately don’t appear to be available for purchase, and if they were, the design is obviously only compatible with the iPhone.
Bicycle sharing programs, where you grab a bike at one locale, ride it to your destination, and then return it to another, are not uncommon in large urban areas. But sometimes a non-human powered mode of transport is preferred, and the ‘Link’ Urban Scooter System is just that, finding itself somewhere between bike sharing and renting a car. The ‘hubs’ can be mounted to existing light poles, which are already secure and wired for power, and each one contains 4 collapsible electric scooters that can be borrowed and used for short trips around the city.
Users would have to pre-register with the program in order to gain access to the scooters, and they’d also be issued a mandatory helmet which would have to be worn at all times. Clearly the guy in the photo montage above is NOT a registered user.
The ‘Link’ Urban Scooter System concept was created by Anton Grimes, a student at the University of New South Wales, as part of the Australian International Design Awards. But it also suits Sydney’s 2030 plan to reduce the amount of cars in the city and make it more pedestrian-friendly.
If you’ve ever wondered how long it takes the postal service to deliver something as simple as a postcard, then you’ll appreciate this concept. Created by the DAG-designlab, the Stopper postcard comes with an actual digital timer with an LCD display in the upper corner that will keep track of how long it’s been from when the postcard was sent, to when it arrives at its destination. Really nothing more than a curiosity killer, but clever nonetheless.
Fans of space history will immediately notice that the MIR alarm clock looks nothing like Mir. We’ll tackle that in due course. Meantime, it’s a solar powered radio alarm clock, and it’s painted gold, and it looks altogether too pretty and too fragile to wake me up in the morning lest I sleepily (and violently) attempt to silence it.
Now, on to the relevant issue: the MIR clock doesn’t look like Mir. After much research, I have concluded that this should be called the Resurs clock, after the Resurs 500 capsule launched by the Russians in 1992 to promote the 500th anniversary of the voyage of Christopher Columbus. See for yourself:
The MIR alarm clock is currently just a concept, probably because they don’t have the name right.
Hey. You. You know what? You’re wasting electricity right now. And you could be harvesting all of that energy and pumping it back into your house. The Inlet Outlet concept is designed to be mounted next to your existing outlets, but instead of taking electricity out of them, you put electricity into them. The outlets will come with a variety of different adapter kits that let you convert waste energy emitted by things around your house into electricity generators, things like door hinges. Or a Wii Fit. Or a hamster wheel. Or bed springs: “hey babe, want to go generate some electricity?”
Realistically, that’s why this is only a concept, though… If it was that cheap and easy to turn everyday objects into electricity generators, wouldn’t we be doing it already? The sad fact is that for the near future, it’s almost always going to be less efficient to produce things like this than it’s going to be to use them. It’s still a cool idea, though.
Whatever you may or may not like about Microsoft, their vision for what their products could be in ten years certainly is impressive:
What struck me most about this video was how possible everything actually is. Yeah, it’s all very render-y, but if you look at the underlying tech, much of it is stuff that we’ve already seen working (and in some cases consumer) examples of: Surface, transparent LCDs, augmented reality, gesture interfaces, e-paper… It’s all already here. Well, not here in front of me here, but don’t forget, tech tends to develop on an exponential, rather than linear, scale. My hope is that we’ll see at least some of these concepts well before 2019. Because by then I’ll be all, like, old.
Related Tags: Concepts, Eco-friendly, Power
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