After successfully driving from Melbourne to Sydney on one charge, Brighsun’s all-electric bus has clocked a Guinness World Record of 1,018km on one charge.
In the near future, car buyers may find themselves putting on Microsoft’s HoloLens augmented reality headset in order to check out a Volvo in a kind of virtual showroom. The car manufacturer has announced a partnership with Microsoft to incorporate the HoloLens into the car buying experience. The concept they debuted today images a customer and car dealer putting on the headset and interacting with a holographic car.
The HoloLens would allow users to do the typical things one would expect when shopping for a car, like comparing colors and wheel rims, as well as much more, like inspecting a projection of the engine from any angle, getting a view of what it’s like to sit inside, or experience demonstrations of a car’s unique features.
Transparent walls and customized cabins may be ahead, according to Airbus.
If you think in-flight Wi-Fi and lie-flat seats are cutting edge, just wait until 2050. That’s when aircraft cabins will feature holographic pop-up gaming displays and seats that adjust to each passenger’s size and shape, according to Airbus. In its vision for the future, Airbus predicts that the cabin walls of planes will be transparent, providing amazing views of the earth. Those with vertigo could block the view with an opaque hologram around their seat. Themed zones will replace first, business and economy classes, so individuals could choose areas in which to relax, play games, interact with other passengers or hold business meetings with people on the ground. This could even top the flying car.
“For bicycles are messengers. Picasso recognised that they carry meaning when he made a saddle and handlebars into a bull’s head, and Duchamp (in his case, non-meaning) when he put a bicycle wheel in an art gallery.”
Ugh, this is just typical. You think you know the way the world works: wind blows, fire burns, wheels spin and – wait, what’s this thing doing?
What? You mean, it can actually move in any direction without so much as turning on an axis? That’s blowing my mind. I’m no gear head, but I’m sort of attached to having a steering wheel in my car, you know? Now you’re saying that self-driving cars will take those away, and now there won’t even be wheels to turn in the direction you want to go in?
“Just a few years ago, automated parking was a revolutionary new technology — now it comes as a standard option in some production models. This is how I believe driverless vehicles will come to be accepted in the future,” says Wei-Bin Zhang, IEEE fellow and a researcher engineer at the California PATH program, Institute of Transportation Studies of University of California at Berkeley.
That’s right — we may be on the brink of an all-out self-driving car revolution.
We’ve already seen cars that can stay in their lanes and apply the breaks by themselves, so to many, an autonomous car is just the next step in the natural progression. And the automotive industry is taking this very seriously. According to a study by Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), the self-driving market is estimated to grow to $33.89 billion in the next five years.
