Hanyoung Lee has come up with an ingenious new crosswalk design which creates a virtual wall using 'plasma lasers.' The lasers are at a low enough strength so as to not burn holes through cars or pedestrians, and project an image of people crossing the street in red. The virtual wall has an increase ability to slow drivers down and stop. The barrier causes what could be called an "I don't want to drive into a wall" effect.
While its definitely going to be a while before we see any thing like this in our cities it is a look at what cross walks of the future could look like.
Yuri Ivanov of the Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories has come up with a comprehensive building monitoring and tracking system that may actually be less invasive of peoples privacy then current CCTV systems. He and his college Christopher Wren outfitted their office with 215 detectors placed at 2 meter intervals. These detectors capture less information in terms of raw data, but they are actually able to generate much more data then a conventional CCTV system. To understand how this is possible one only needs to think of the way that these sensors work.. a motion sensor picks up and relays if and when a person goes by, by having the sensors spaced closely together they are able to track a persons movements through the office. A CCTV on the other hand captures images of the areas they surveil regardless of whether anyone is there or not. Wren explained the difference as such;
"It's not going to catch you picking your nose. You can only tell that some person went by," Wren explains, "maybe this is better than living under thousands of cameras."
The system basically knows that you are in the building but you could be walking around naked and it wouldn't be able to tell. In order to make sense of all the data that these motion sensors capture the pair developed a software package that we have only seen before in Harry Potter of all places, they developed their own version of the marauders map. People on the display show up as bright spots of light with a comet tail that fades away behind them. Giving viewers the ability to both see where they are and what their trajectories are. The program also allows them to compile this movement data over extended periods of time and look for anomalies and patters.
The implications for security and traffic data collection are exciting. The pair was able to analyse data from a fire drill to discover that two out of three of the fire exits went virtually unused. The congregation habits of people and how long they stay at work also have implications for making air conditioning and heating systems more efficient. The system seems like an excellent trade off for better security without compromising personal privacy.
As you will no doubt learn the more you navigate around this site, I am a big fan of simcity. While other coworkers and friends of mine can spend hours talking about assorted Mages, Elves, cloaks, daggers and other gaming fun, I prefer the inherent simplicity of essentially being a supreme dictator over my own mini continent and the assorted cities and towns I have built there. Often times in this game real world buildings and landmarks are modeled and added into the game by a dedicated group of players that is still going strong five years after the release of the current incarnation and in spite of a newer addition, but I digress, a couple of months ago a dedicated modeler came up with a collection of 'sky farms' to be used in the game and I thought, what a cool idea, it would be great to do this in real life. Now it appears that other architects and engineers are working on projects of this type.
In the not so distant future it is predicted that as much as 80% of the worlds population will live in urban areas, and by 2050 the population of the world will increase by as many as 3 billion people. Three billion people require a fair bit of food and current farming practices are unlikely to be able to provide the needed supply. Dr Dickson Despommier suggests Vertical Farms, which are at first a radical idea more suited to science fiction, but after consideration is not all that radical at all. After all we have been growing vegetables under green houses for a long time.
Dr. Dickson Despommier’s Vertical Farm website is a clearing house for vertical farm designs and he outlines his vision for what urban farming can and should be What is new is the urgent need to scale up this technology to accommodate another 3 billion people. An entirely new approach to indoor farming must be invented, employing cutting edge technologies. The Vertical Farm must be efficient (cheap to construct and safe to operate).
Vertical farms, many stories high, will be situated in the heart of the world's urban centers. If successfully implemented, they offer the promise of urban renewal, sustainable production of a safe and varied food supply (year-round crop production), and the eventual repair of ecosystems that have been sacrificed for horizontal farming.
Dr Despommier goes on to outline multiple advantages to this new vision for farming; things like year round crop production (great for Canada), elimination of herbicides and pesticides, and a reduction in agricultural run off as most vertical farm systems have waste water reclamation systems built in. Not to mention a number of other great points.
Adding a grocery store to the ground floor could eliminate shipping costs for all produce and enable these stores to sell produce that is truly fresh, they wouldn't even have to pick the vegetables prematurely to make them transportable.
I am a believer in cities, as is well known the majority of our world's population lives in urban areas now and this trend will no doubt continue for the foreseeable future. Unfortunately many of our cities are ill equipped to deal with the demands that are placed on them. The suburban dream has proven especially difficult for our cities by making them inefficient and spread too thin to provide the services expected of them. At present I am a student in the Urban Planning Program at Concordia University and have rediscovered my love of cities and the urban environment. In this forum I will be exploring issues in urban design and also publishing some of my own works and idea's. In the past I have found it hard to find a site that truly speaks to my interests in ubanism and hope to make this a database of urban design, along with a forum for Daniel Barham Urban Design.
