Navigating becomes exploring

What We're Clicking On – December 13th, 2018

In our weekly news filter ‘What We’re Clicking On’, we share our thoughts on the most interesting articles relating to the future of cities, buildings and interiors.

Porsche partners up with Mapbox to focus on ‘exploration’ instead of ‘navigation’, bringing across the message that driving is not about getting asap from A to B but driving is fun and adventurous when guided ‘through the mountains and up the coast’. By making use of Mapbox’s tools such as 3D and AR, Porsche wants to surprise its drivers. Tech-magazine ‘Wired’ writes about adding social elements to the ride, such as leaving ‘notes’ on your favorite roads, for friends who might drive the route a few days later. The idea of alternative route planning isn’t new. AMS, the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions, initiated the Healthy Urban Route Planner which offers cyclists the possibility to choose the route with the least pollution or the aesthetically most pleasing route.
Read more about the ideas on Wired and on Mapbox’s blog

The O-Wind Turbine is a spherical small scale windturbine suitable for small-scale energy production by individual apartment dwellers when for instance fixed outside balconies. The O-Wind Turbine is developed by scientists Nicolas Orellana and Yaseen Noorani for high-rise residents to generate sustainable energy and prevent excessive carbon emissions. How it works? ‘The turbine makes use of Bernoulli’s principle for its mechanical motion’, the website explains. ‘The structure is lined up with vents (…) that are placed all across the sphere making it receptive to wind from all directions in both the vertical and horizontal planes. The turbine will rotate in the same sense about a fixed axis regardless of wind direction. This turbine rotation is used to power a generator that can produce electricity, which can be fed into the national grid, hence providing financial incentive to users and improving the region’s sustainable energy production.’ Right now high-rise residents are behind their family houses counterparts that have been generating sustainable electricity with solar panels and traditional wind turbines. The O-Wind could change this, especially as it turned out to be the international winner of the James Dyson Award. Read more about the O-wind and its design principles here

The 3D graphics card company NVidia developed a driving simulator that drives you through a city that is being created by AI in real time, from scratch. The footage comes from videos gathered from self-driving cars, during a one-week trial driving around cities. Subsequently it took one week for the AI to learn what it was looking at and how it could build virtual cities itself using NVidia’s Unreal Engine 4. Currently, NVidia states, ‘constructing the virtual worlds of big video games takes countless 2D and 3D modelers and an underpaid network of overseas labor, because each object is still drawn by hand with a mouse or stylus’. AI- tools like NVidia’s come in handy for architects and city planners to render rapid prototypes to test theories before cementing them in real bricks and concrete.
Read more about the tool on Fast Company