Minimizing your travel time and complexity between home and, well, anywhere else, this living-room-and-car combination takes you straight from a skyscraper condo to the streets of your city.

Charles Bombardier, a mechanical engineer from Canada, worked with vehicle designer Ashish Thulkar to develop Tridika. The resulting pod-like living room is secretly a maglev car designed to scale the sides of buildings and become an extension of your home (that also takes you away from home).

Using magnetic levitation technology, the room/car speeds along tracks, climbing buildings and descending to join other vehicles below. Like many driverless car concepts, it takes a vehicle-and-room approach, letting people who would be drivers sit back and enjoy the ride instead. As a bonus, it minimizes wasted space – when you are not at home, do you really need to leave your living room behind?

The post Convertible: Maglev Living Room Doubles as Driverless Car first appeared on Gajitz.

In addition to an array of other useful features, this futuristic mobility-aiding cane contains a camera and facial recognition software to help the visually impaired pick friendly faces out of the crowd.

The cane is a widely-recognized and frequently-used staple for those who cannot see well or at all, and thus an idea vessel to enhance with GPS and other computer-driven aids. The device is being designed by Waheed Rafiq, Steve Adigbo, and Richard Howlett, researchers at Birmingham City University in the United Kingdom, and still just a prototype at this point.

In terms of face-seeing software: the built-in camera takes continuous images, searches for faces, then scans them against a database tied to your social profiles or other uploaded images (you can also use the cane itself to take new photos for the database). When a match is found, the user is notified via bone-conduction earpiece designed to cut down on auditory distractions.

The long-term vision is a commercial version but that is still a ways off. The goal is also to include only what is necessary in the cane, perhaps primarily hardware, leaving the heavy lifting to modular software components or third-party devices already in hand (like mobile phones). Other smart canes are also in development, some being marketed for as little as $40, but with far fewer features.

The post Smart Cane for the Blind Recognizes Faces From 30 Feet first appeared on Gajitz.

Airless tires have been the up-and-coming futuristic auto technology for several years. Kumho Tire is taking the concept into even more futuristic territory with a tire that changes shape and properties to adapt to current road conditions. Instead of using different tires for different seasons (or using all-season tires that might not be optimal in certain conditions), the Maxplo tire customizes itself as needed.

The Maxplo concept tire is made up of tread blocks that adjust based on the terrain on which you are driving. In wet, rainy conditions, grooves around the circumference of the tire and all over its surface channel water away from the area of contact between the tire and the street.

Off-road driving causes the tire’s blocks to move apart, widening the tire’s footprint and and increasing traction and braking power. When driving on snowy and icy roads, hidden spikes come out from between the tread blocks to grip the road and prevent slipping and sliding.

The Maxplo concept took first place in the Italian A’ Design Awards – Futuristic Class. Kumho states that this type of tire technology won’t be hitting your local tire dealer anytime soon, but perhaps the concepts can start to filter into tire design over the next few years. One day, if we’re lucky, we really will be able to drive on tires that customize themselves to whatever road conditions we find ourselves in at the moment.

The post Easy Rider: Tires Adapt and Morph Based on Road Conditions first appeared on Gajitz.

We love listening to records, but all of that sound system equipment sitting out on the shelf is not exactly pretty. Designer Roy Harpaz came up with a record player design that not only sounds great, but also looks like a piece of modern art.

The vertical record player is egg-shaped with a front made of CNC-cut walnut wood. Inside, very modern components give your prized records the very best treatment. The TOC can play even old and warped records which would ordinarily be unplayable thanks to spherical ball bearings that let the record spin freely.

The front of the player has touchscreen controls, but you can also control playback using the matching remote control. Unlike old record players, the TOC even lets you skip between songs thanks to a special sensor that reads the grooves to find out where the next song begins.

Buttons on the side let you choose between three record sizes and three rotation speeds. The player features standards speaker outputs as well as two USB inputs so you can play your favorite music right from a flash drive, smartphone, or laptop. The TOC is a concept, not a consumer product, but we’ll still be hoping to see it on our shelves sometime in the future.

The post Sexy Sculptural Record Player Combines Analog + Futurism first appeared on Gajitz.

Working out at home is far different than working out at the gym – so why is home gym equipment so similar to the gear you’d find at the gym? The designers at Lunar Europe adopted the challenge of creating a home workout experience that felt more tailored to the home environment.

The result is Tera: an interactive concept that combines home decorating with home fitness. The circular wool rug looks ordinary enough when it isn’t in use, but when you turn on the specially-developed app it becomes a high-tech exercise mat.

After you select a training discipline (like yoga, pilates, or Zumba), the LEDs on Tera’s surface help guide your movements. The pressure sensitive surface can detect with a high level of accuracy how you are moving your body, and the app gives you feedback on your workout.

The app records and analyzes your workouts, and when you’re done you can share the information with a personal trainer via social media. Tera is a concept and not a real product at the moment, but the innovative fitness tool has already won several design awards.

The post Hi-Tech Yoga: Wool Rug Becomes Interactive Exercise Mat first appeared on Gajitz.