Category Archives: Gizmos News (via Gizmodo)

Only in France: Rollerblade Man masters Kamasutra on wheels @ 60mph

April 2, 2009 at 3:49 pm

(Source:  Treehugger & ManiacWorld)

We’re big advocates for all things human-powered, but we really really like to see this particular efficiency put to use for transportation. Enter with a flash “Rollerblade Man” who’s keeping all his options open by covering his entire body with a suit of wheels allowing one to travel up to 60 miles-per-hour while maintaining any position found in the Kama Sutra. Note: As always, please wear a helet if you are to attempt anything on rollerblades.  He’s wearing a helmet in the video below.

Frenchman Jean-Yves Blondeau first conceived of his plastic Buggy Rollin’ suit in 1994, while he was a student at Olivier de Serres design school, in Paris.

The invention, which allows a wearer to top 60 miles per hour while maintaining any position found in the Kama Sutra, didn’t exactly catch fire with consumers.

Not one to give up, Blondeau recently refined the suit to a stripped-down 31-wheel version and developed his own playbook of moves, like the Zaphial (rolling flat on your back with all four limbs pointed straight up) and the Smooth Buggy Dog (three limbs on the ground and one rolling along a wall).

 
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Vehicle Manufacturers Are Leading Intelligent Transportation Systems Efforts with Obstacle Detection Systems Launching in 2009, According to ABI Research

March 31, 2009 at 11:41 am

(Source: Fox Business)

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) have been under development for more than a decade. While the promise of road-infrastructure based traffic management is still years away, some car manufacturers are moving ahead with autonomous radar-based obstacle detection systems increasing the safety of both drivers and pedestrians.

“Vehicle manufacturers are mainly interested in active safety as a new differentiator,” says ABI Research Practice Director Dominique Bonte. “However, avoiding accidents has a huge impact on traffic congestion levels, the reduction of which remains the primary goal of ITS.”

Toyota is planning to add a millimeter-wave radar system to some of its car models in Japan in 2009. The driver is warned about potential side and front collisions and when a crash is imminent automatic braking, seat belt retraction and air bag deployments are initiated. In the US a similar pre-collision system will be available on the 2010 Toyota Prius as an option. A similar feature was announced by Hyundai at CES. However, the current automotive slump will delay the adoption of active safety as a standard option across all brands.

To realize the benefits of integrated traffic management ITS requires vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication. While many successful tests based on the Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC: undefined, undefined, undefined%) protocol are ongoing in Japan (ITS-Safety 2010 project), Europe (ERTICO, CAR 2 CAR Communication Consortium) and the US (DoT’s IntelliDriveSM project), full rollout is not expected before 2015.

Click here to read more. 

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Tech savvy teenager takes Lexington transit into (un)chartered territory

March 30, 2009 at 6:19 pm
Danny Moraff (above), a 17-year-old member of Lexington's transit advisory board, has been a transportation buff for a long time. When he was in preschool, Moraff dressed as the D-Line for Halloween (below).

Danny Moraff dressed as the D-Line for Halloween.

(Source: Boston Globe via Bernie Wagenglast)

The town of Lexington’s transit service is fairly informal. The stops are pretty much wherever you happen to be standing when you see a bus.

But in one regard, the scrappy Lexpress and its six bus routes are ahead of the MBTA and its sophisticated network of boat, bus, light rail, heavy rail, commuter rail, bus rapid transit, and trackless trolley service.

Thanks to a local teenager, it was one of the smallest of pioneer transit agencies to integrate its route maps and schedules into Google Transit, a feature of Google Maps that reminds users seeking driving directions that they can also take buses and trains. Google Transit, launched in its current form in fall 2007, also helps users figure out how much time they’ll need for their trip and where and when to show up for a bus or subway so they don’t get left behind.

Danny Moraff, now 17, decided when he was 15 that he liked the idea of Google Transit – then in a developmental stage on the Web – and its ability to draw more people out of their cars. So he joined Lexington’s transit advisory board, convinced officials it was a worthwhile project, and volunteered to do all the legwork himself.

“I’m not a techie,” said Gail Wagner, transportation services coordinator for Lexpress, which has a $450,000 annual budget. “This is a shoestring operation.”

For Moraff, that meant spending all his free time riding six bus routes to plot the longitude, latitude, and typical arrival times on every block in the system. It meant logging every intersection in town and figuring out the computer coding that suited Google’s engineering needs. Moraff estimates it took him 60 to 100 hours over a period of 18 months, in between internships and schoolwork.

Click here toread the entire story. 

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Sweet Tweets! – OnStar May Add Voice-Activated Twitter Capability

March 30, 2009 at 1:00 pm

 (Source: Jalopnik)

OnStar may soon partner with Twitter to offer hands-free tweeting capability to its suite of voice-activated communications services. This may be the perfect compliment to OnStar’s automatic crash reporting.

A writer at GearLive owns a couple of OnStar-equipped vehicles and received a survey touting the following Twitter service:

“While in your vehicle, you can use OnStar to submit and retrieve tweets (messages) via your Twitter account. Using OnStar’s Voice-Activated Hands-Free Calling system, and having your voice converted into text, you can provide updates which would appear in the “What are you doing?” section of your Twitter homepage. It is also possible to listen to a tweet that was sent to you by someone else after it has been converted into voice. You can send and receive tweets without having to type or read anything.”

The service doesn’t seem complicated to set up and, using a voice-to-text system like the one found in SYNC, this should already be possible.

Click here to read the entire article.

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Electrifying, Seductive & Big Bang for the Buck! Tesla unveils the first mass-produced highway-capable electric car

March 26, 2009 at 7:12 pm

(Source: Autoblog; Picture: Autoblog)

 What can $50,000 can get you?

After a lot of hype and delivery of 250 Tesla Roadsters, the company’s Model S was unveiled today in Hawthorne, California.  It is expect that production will be ramped up to 20,000 units annually by the end of the first year of production; after the $7,500 tax break, the Model S will start at just under $50,000 – $49,900 to be exact; and 440-volt charging will be available. That base price is for the 160-mile range pack; a 230-mile range pack and a 300-mile range packwill also be available. The biggest hitch: the car doesn’t go into production until Q3 of 2011.

Transportgooru thinks this is a game changer and here is the “why”:

  • According to Tesla’s numbers, buying a Tesla S will save you $10-$15K vs a comparably priced gas-powered sedan when gas is $4 per gallon. For an equivalent comparison, you’d have to lease a $35,000 gas-powered car. 
  • The car fits seven people and their luggage: five adults and two children in rear-facing seats under the hatch inside, with luggage in the boot up front.
  • If not people, it can fit a mountain bike with its wheels still on, a surfboard and a 50-inch television at the same time.
  • On a 220V outlet, the car can be recharged in 4 hours.
  • The quickness: the standard S will get to 60 in 5.5 to 6.0 seconds. A coming sport version will get to 60 in “well under five seconds,” the company’s folks say.

These facts are what one would come to expect from a conventiona, gasoline powered automobiles that rules the roads today.   As more charging stations pop-up around the country, these vehicles will make transportation seamless.  The few cons  that could be obviously recognized are the re-charging times and the lack of charging stations at public locations (Gas stations, parking lots, etc).  With the conventional gasoline cars, refuelling is quick and doesn’t take more than 5 minutes at the gas stations, which means you can continue travelling without enduring massing delays while traveling longer distances.   It can be expected that unveiling of such cars renders a wonderful opportunity for regional electric companies to enter a niche market to provide “electricity” through charging stations in the service areas along highways, just like a gas station.  Or even better if these charging stations are added to existing gas stations.   If charging times can be shortened with the advent of new technology (See the TransportGooru article about MIT’s breakthrough research on batteries, allowing for lightening quick charging times) 

Click here to read the entire post on Autoblog’s site anddon’t forget to check out the eye popping Tesla Gallery.  Here is Wall Street Journal’s interview with Tesla at the North American Int’l Auto Show (via YouTube):

 

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MIT’s mobile application demonstrates the size of your Carbon footprint by your transportation mode choice & much more

March 25, 2009 at 5:54 pm

The school’s Mobile Experience Lab explores the future of life with the mobile handset

(Source: ContactlessNews via Bernie Wagenblast’  TCN)

Most trials of Near Field Communication (NFC) have involved payment applications at the neighborhood department store, restaurant or transit agency. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge took a different tact, however, attempting to illustrate the many other ways NFC could be used in everyday life.

The result was a video featuring several students and how they utilized NFC-compliant cell phones. Right now, it’s more a vision on how NFC can influence the lives of citizens, says Federico Casalegno, director of MIT’s Mobile Experience Lab and one of the movers behind this NFC project.

The lab was created to close the breach between the university and industry. “Our group was to imagine new products and services for mobile phones three years out,” he says. “We wanted to know how users could take advantage of this new technology. We have a technology that is pretty secure and what we’re looking into is how we can use it to improve human experiences.”   Everything in the video is feasible now, albeit in many instances in just a prototype format. “But paying for transit or exchanging data through your phones or making payments, even networking and gaming are all available now,” says Casalegno.

One possible idea is to explore “how users can ride together and maybe collect eco points or monitor their eco footprint or their environmental impact,” says Casalegno. “You can monitor how many times you use public transit, or a private car versus a shared car or bicycle program. You could even have a friendly competition among users about who is collecting more eco-points.”
Potential NFC applications in the Transportation sector (pared down from a lengthy list):
  • Get your bike from the rack tapping the phone on the service pole. Monitor your movements inside the city or check the bike’s availability near you.
  • Car Pooling: Publish your proposals for car pooling, search for people who are also going where you need to go.
  • Smart objects: In addition to having your phone dial the number of the person in a picture, you could also send a text message to that person. The same system can work for bulletin boards, providing a shortcut for announcement details or contact information.
  • Carbon footprint monitoring: Track your footprint by your choice in transportation. Other potentials explored by MIT include using it with Zip Car, a car sharing service, allowing you to check availability, then rent and pay for the car.
Click here to reead the entire article.
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Too lazy to press a button at the crosswalk? Say hello to Crosswalk 2.0!!!

March 20, 2009 at 5:51 pm

(Source: Tree Hugger & Streetfilms)

You Don’t Even Have to Press a Button…
You’d think that cosswalk technology would be pretty static. How can you improve a crosswalk? Sure you can put blinking lights and signs on each side of the road, but there’s so much visual pollution in cities that these wouldn’t change much. Well, there’s a way! This crosswalk in Seattle takes crosswalks to the next level. Crosswalk 2.0, if you want. Check out the video above by our friends at Streetfilms.  

How does it work:  The folks at Streetflilms explained it in their post:   “As you enter the crosswalk make sure you touch the yellow rectangle on the sidewalk. This activates the lights that line the crosswalk. Drivers stop and it should be safe to begin your adventure: you’ll feel a bit like an airplane coming in for a landing. Frankly, it’s very empowering and a lot of fun! ”  Here is the video of the crosswalk, courtesy of our friends @ Streetfilms.

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Planning to visit Chicago? Better check your car insurance! Chicago’s Traffic Lights May Scan for Car Insurance

March 19, 2009 at 12:57 pm

 (Source: Gizmodo)

Ticketing red light runners is standard practice in many big cities, but Chicago is considering doing one better and scanningevery car going by for up to date insurance.

It wouldn’t matter if you ran the light or were driving conscientiously. The proposed system would exploit both existing stoplight cameras and general security cameras to scan your plate and hand it over to the InsureNet database. If InsureNet discovered that you were lacking insurance, you’d receive a $300-$500 ticket in the mail.

Click here to read the entire article.

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The future is here – Terrafugia “Flying Car” Makes First Flight

March 19, 2009 at 11:21 am

(Source:  Jalopnik)

This morning it’s official — the future is now. The Terrafugia Transition (R), the first plausible “flying car” (or more precisely, a “roadable aircraft”), took its first official flight earlier this month. 

 Terrafugia press conference at 9:30 AM this morning offered the following details:  The two-seat aircraft is able to fly 450 miles at over 115 MPH and is designed to transform from plane to car in less than 30 seconds.  Click here to read the entire press release.

The Transition, their first “roadable aircraft” (we’re going to go ahead and call it a Jetsons-like “flying car”), took its official first flight on March 5th, 2009 at Plattsburgh International Airport. It’s the first time we’ve seen an actually plausible“roadable aircraft” work in real life.

 Click here to view the full gallery of Terrafugia.  Also, Here is an awesome video from YouTube showing the vehicle in action.

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Sentience Intelligent Cruise Control Lets You Forget the Pedals Altogether While Driving

March 13, 2009 at 12:58 pm

(source: GizMag via Gizmodo)

Driving would be way more fun if we didn’t have to worry about the whole gas and brake thing, right? Sentience understands this, and their intelligent cruise control means you can finally forget about it.

How it works

 

Based on route information – which could eventually be integrated with a commercial navigation system – the Sentience vehicle will calculate and follow an optimal driving strategy. Its control system adjusts vehicle speed, acceleration and deceleration via its adaptive cruise control and regenerative braking. Using GPS and mapping data it takes into account the speed limits, traffic conditions, the road’s gradient and features including bends and even speed bumps, as well as less predictable road features including roundabouts, to determine the most efficient possible route.

It’s also keyed in to traffic light timing, so it will automatically start decelerating if it knows the green light you’re approaching is about to turn red. The driver simply keys in a destination, and steers the car without a foot on either pedal, letting the car make the decisions on acceleration and braking. Of course, you’d want to keep your foot close to the brakes to over-ride the system in case of an emergency situation.

The Sentience system also concentrates on getting the most out of hybrid drive systems, by optimizing the regenerative braking strategy for the batteries and increasing the availability of electric-only drive mode where possible.

 

. Sentience will analyze the best route to get you to your destination, and then will handle all the acceleration and braking for the trip. Using GPS and mapping data, It recognizes roundabouts, speed bumps, corners and even speed limits. Sentience will know when a light is about to turn red and slow down accordingly.

Click here to read more. 

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