Imagine a future where you can design your own vegetables. Say goodbye to growing boring baby sprouts on your windowsill and welcome a climate-controlled cultivation system to your kitchen top. Simply change the parameters of your crops with a touchscreen interface and you’ll be on your way. Sounds good, does it? This growing scenario does not exist yet, but food designer and NNN fellow Chloé Rutzerveld is looking for innovative methods to turn this fantasy into a reality. Introducing the Future Food Formula, a formula for success.
Playing an instrument, picking something up, holding your oversized phone in one hand. These are all things you might be better at if you’d have an extra thumb. By designing and creating The Third Thumb Project, Royal College of Art graduate Danielle Clode reframed prosthetics as extensions of the body, rather than replacements for missing parts.
How do trees feel? To raise awareness over climate change and discover what really makes trees tick, scientists from Ghent University’s Laboratory of Plant Ecology in Belgium have developed a network of twittering trees that allows them to monitor the plants feelings.
Do you recognize this street? Small chances you do, as this street simply doesn’t exist, it was generated and drawn by an AI. Researcher Qifeng Chen from Stanford University, California, employs a supercomputer to create images of streets and spaces from its artificial memory.
You step outside your home without your phone and are seized by a sudden fear. Or you notice that your battery is low when out and about and decide to get home as quickly as possible. Do you recognize these anxieties? According to researchers from universities in Hong Kong and Seoul, they may be symptoms of something called “nomophobia”. That is, no-mobile-phobia: the fear of being separated from your smartphone.
And the winner of the Sweden International Virtual Reality Award in the category Best 360º Video is… Next Nature Habitat VR!
Our immersive experience allows us to travel through four different future environments, asking the question: what does it mean to live in a next nature? With the VR, we aim to stimulate debate on how we want to live in the future. According to the jury, the Next Nature Habitat VR “skillfully utilizes the VR medium and narration to take the viewer on a captivating thought-provoking visual trip about alternative habitats for humankind”. Congratulations to all the winners and finalists of the Sweden VR Contest 2017 and thanks to everyone who contributed to the development this production. Did you missed it? Watch the trailer above and ask yourself: where would you live?
During the course of human evolution, work and leisure became separate concepts. Daily life for our ancestors was hard, mostly long hours of work trying to ensure basic survival. But with the rise of modernity, we have domesticated ourselves with new technologies. Keeping in mind that Facebook recently revealed to have two billion active users a month (which sums up about 25% of the global population), this makes us wonder how the average minute is spent on the Internet. Peculiar image of the week.
