The Design Technology Blog

Author: BenG

  • Water JetPack

    Everyone would like to be able to fly above the water, for unlimited time, and that is exactly what Jetlev-Flyer allows you to do. It is designed by a company named MS Watersports GmbH, a German company. The water jet pack is easy to maneuver and extremely stable, the main website explains that “the bilateral nozzles are positioned higher than your center of gravity, so your body behaves like a pendulum or hanging flower pot. The nozzles are also designed to counteract against rolling motion from side-to-side. The hose and water inside it adds a great deal of extra weight below your center of gravity, so the higher you fly, the more roll stability you have. In forward motion, drag from the hose provides a third stabilizing point, ensuring stable forward motion. Finally, the jetpack’s rigid back rest, saddle and body harness keep your upper torso rigid while the trapeze prevents your legs from flailing in the air.” So those qualities make the jet pack extremely flexible for the user allowing ease of use, and anyone older than 18 years old can use it, as long as they are in good physical shape and good health. The JetLev-Flyer can go up to a maximum of 30 feet above the water, and if someone falls, they will be falling at a speed less than 30mph and the water drag will slow them down, so they won’t hit the water so hard that it will cause injuries, plus the users use protective equipment. Another cool thing is that the JetLev-Flyer was designed so it can take up to 6 minutes to learn how to use it, so in no time you will be able to fly above the water. It also allows you to do a certain moves, such as 90 and 180 turn while up on the water, also you can do tight turns and many other more moves. And for people that don’t like noisy products, the JetLev-Flyer has no engine and no moving parts other than the articulated thrust assembly, the only noise is the water jets making splashing noises when they enter the water and the boat unit which provides the water for the jetpack has a great sound insulation. In conclusion the JetLev-Flyer is a fun product to use, which allows you to fly around, plus the jetpack is a quiet, comfortable product, the only negative aspect is the insanely high price varying from 79,900 –  99,900 Euros, so in other words only people with a great amount of money can afford such product.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    For more information you can visit the main website at http://www.jetlev-flyer.com/home.html

  • Increase in Organic Food Sales

    People are starting to buy more natural and organic foods rather than normal foods that are sold in the markets. The reasons are simple, normal foods contain hormones and preservatives and other chemicals, an example is chicken, which is injected with hormones so that it will develop faster and grow fatter, then the chickens can be sold faster and when they are sold they look fatter and bigger and more “delicious”, but the big amount of hormones that the chicken has in it can have serious consequences to little kids that eat it. One of the consequences is early puberty in girls which accounts for a higher chance in breast cancer. But in many occasions no one has been able to conclude whether meat with high levels of hormones cause young puberty, breast cancer, or a higher breast development on kids. That is why people have started to trust more organic products rather than normal dairy products. People believe that organic foods are healthier, safer, tastier, and more environmental friendly than normal products.

    Some people might not know but there is a difference between organic and natural foods. Food can only be labeled as “natural” if it follows certain requirements; those are:

    “(1) The product does not contain any artificial flavor or flavoring, coloring ingredient, or chemical preservative (as defined in 21 CFR 101.22), or any other artificial or synthetic ingredient; and

    (2) The product and its ingredients are not more than minimally processed. Minimal processing may include:

    (a) Those traditional processes used to make food edible or to preserve it or to make it safe for human consumption, e.g., smoking, roasting, freezing, drying, and fermenting, or

    (b) Those physical processes which do not fundamentally alter the raw product and/or which only separate a whole, intact food into component parts, e.g., grinding meat, separating eggs into albumen and yolk, and pressing fruits to produce juices.”1

    Organic food refers to food produced by a farmer that uses environmental friendly farming techniques, such as the “conservation of soil and water, the use of renewable resources and use of natural fertilizers and conventional pesticides. The food will come from animals that are given no antibiotics or growth hormones.”1

    In other words natural and organic foods are “fresh” and less or not altered at all compared to the normal products that undergo many chemical processes before going into the market. That is why every year more and more people are buying organic and natural foods.

    Sources:

    1) http://www.wikinvest.com/concept/Natural_%26_Organic_Foods_Consumption\

    2) http://envirocancer.cornell.edu/factsheet/diet/fs37.hormones.cfm

  • The Cubic Houses

    How would you feel to live on a tilted house that is basically a cube? and to live in a forest of these tilted cubic houses?. Well someone thought about it, and the original idea came about in the 1970s by Piet Bloom. The city of Rotterdam asked him to design housing on top of a pedestrian bridge and he decided to use the cubic houses idea. The whole concept behind these houses is that Pit tries to create a forest by each cube been an abstract tree.

    The cubes are tilted and sit on hexagon-shaped pole structures. The structure of the pole consists of three concrete pillars that have concrete filling the space in between.

    The cube has a basic structure of a concrete floor with concrete pillars. On top of this structure is something similar to a typical wood frame structure with wood stud framing and rockwool insulation.

    The insulation and the wood panels are covered with cement/wood fiberboards, to protect them from exposure to the elements. And to give the cubes a nice appearance, zinc panels were used and complemented by double-glazed windows.

    Sources:

    http://unusual-architecture.com/cubic-houses-rotterdam-netherlands/

    http://www.galinsky.com/buildings/cubichouses/

  • Race Cars and Carbon Fiber

    Racing cars have been a major sport for many years, and the industry of racing has increased since the appearance of F-1 races. Racing cars used to be made from the same material as road cars, that are steel, aluminum and other metals. But on the early 1980s Formula 1 cars underwent some changes, which have become an important part of the design of the car: the use of carbon composite materials to build the chassis.

    Today most of the racing cars chassis, which includes the monocoque, suspension, wings and engine cover, are built with carbon fiber.  Carbon fiber reinforced plastic, or CFRP, is a strong, light and very expensive composite material which, because of its mechanical properties is used to build racing cars at every level.

    The Ascari Kz1 is a super car made completely from carbon fiber

      

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    The four advantages that this kind of material, that other materials don’t have are:

    • Super lightweight
    • Super strong
    • Super stiff
    • Can easily be molded into all kinds of different shapes

     

    Also to better understand that carbon fiber is better than steel (commonly used in some parts in road cars) here is a table:

    Material Tensile strength Density Specific strength
    Carbon fibre 3.50 1.75 2.00
    Steel 1.30 7.90

    0.17

     

    We can see that carbon fiber is almost 3 times stronger and more than 4 times lighter than steel. That is why it is such a good material for racing cars.

     

    Sources:

    http://formula1.about.com/od/car1/a/carbon_fiber.htm

    http://www.solarnavigator.net/composites/carbon_fibre_and_racing_cars.htm

    Pictures:

    http://pictures.topspeed.com/IMG/crop/200703/2007-ascari-kz-1r-gt3_460x0w.jpg

    http://0.tqn.com/d/formula1/1/G/h/2/-/-/fiber1.jpg

     

     

     

  • Brink: Dawn of SMART

    Ever played a war game were you had a small fence or a fallen tree in front of your character, and wondered why your character couldn’t just climb it or just jump over the tree  to get faster to the enemy or skip a long walk. Well, Splash Damage is developing a game, which will be released in 2011, were obstacles are not a problem anymore to you.

    Brink is not just any other first person shooter (FPS), but it’s a game that is going to change the way we know shooting games. The developers of Splash Damage designed a game where you are allowed to move freely through the map, thanks to their program SMART (“Smooth Movement Across Random Terrain”). It allows players to maneuver around complex environments without equally complex input by analyzing their position and judging what they are trying to do. The movement style is that of parkour, similar to that as seen in the Mirror’s Edge and Assassin’s Creed games.

    A little background on the game:

    In Brink, two sides, “Resistance” and “Security”, fight in the previously utopian city known as The Ark, a floating city surrounded by the waters of a flooded Earth. The Ark was designed as a prototype of a perfect city, with renewable resources and no pollution, large enough to support 5,000 residents. However, due to many refugees entering the city from other parts of the world, its population has grown to 50,000, meaning there are not enough resources to go around – resulting in the city being on the brink (hence the name of the game) of a civil war.

    Conclusion:

    In my opinion I think this game will make it far, no other shooting game has tried to approach the genre the way Brink does. I really enjoy playing video games; it’s one of my favorite things to do. And what I have noticed is that control and movement is a very important aspect of a game, because if you don’t have a smooth movement and is hard to control you character, well, you could get killed in the game and have to redo whatever you did before, something that for some people it is really frustrating. It can also make the game so hard that you will get bored of playing it and probably never finish it. So Brink will surely keep you busy for a bunch of hours in front of the TV, and I don’t think anyone will get bored of it, it has a very interesting story line, and it will have a very interesting multiplayer experience. This game is surely an innovation to the shooting genre as we know it.

    Sources:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brink_(video_game)

    http://brinkthegame.com/ark/island/

    http://bethblog.com/index.php/2010/03/04/brink-developer-diary-3-ed-stern/

    http://www.splashdamage.com/brink#/screens_brink/025_tb.jpg