Tag: flying
Banning in-flight gadgets increases parental stress!
Could this be the future of air travel? easyJet reveals concept designs for hybrid plane
Ridiculously impressive and tiny landscape generation
The demoscene is a subculture of computer art that specialises in creating non-interactive audiovisual content to certain set limits. This bit of art, called ‘Elevated’, is an example of the ‘intros’ subcategory, which limits programmers to either 64kb or 4kb file sizes. The above example is 4k.
Watch that video again, and consider that everything – music, landscape and lighting – fits into 4,000 bytes – the equivalent of 800 average english words. That’s *nothing*. That’s less than nothing!
But it’d be difficult for this tech to be integrated into games because it’s so compressed – although file sizes would get smaller, load times would increase massively. In tech, processor speeds are considerably more limited than storage, so for the moment expect this to stay a tiny subculture.
If you want to check it out for yourself, then you can download the file from Pouet, but you’ll need a pretty impressive graphics card to do it justice – it probably won’t work too well on your office PC. Expect to see a black screen for a few mins while it loads, too.
eBay Nutcase of the Week: Aerocar N103D "flying car" up for spares or repair
This innocent-looking little bubble car is, so the auction says, the first and only officially certified and legally usable flying car in the world.
The wings don’t fold out – they come in a separate trailer and need attaching, a process which apparently takes “five minutes”. Once you’re up, you can can soar above (and trying not to think about crashing into) the traffic below at a thrilling airspeed of 100mph…
Ryanair: In-flight mobile phone calls possible within weeks
You know the drill. When you get on a plane, it’s all “Seatbacks up!”, ”
Stow your tray tables!”, “The exits are here, here, and here!”, and “For the love of god, turn your phone off!”. Well, perhaps not any longer. Ryanair have outfitted ten of their planes with the capability to allow you to make in-flight phone calls.
Better put your clothes on! British Transport Police owns a $60,000 flying video-enabled robot!
Good to see our taxes are going towards worthy things, like supplying the British Transport Police with one of these $60,000 r/c flying robots.
Apparently the theft of metal on our British railways is a huge problem, so the Transport Police use these expensive Microdrones to target the thieves – with the bots’ squirting water at the perps. It’s…
Vertipod – the flying Segway (OF DEATH)
Fancy dying in a unique and novel way that will secure your immortality via a report on the local news?
Perhaps you ought to investigate the Vertipod. Clearly little more than a death trap for the rich and tired of life, Vertipod is a hovering, $10,000 potential death machine, which maker Pete Bitar would probably prefer we called a “personal transport solution.”
Forget the tights and cockpiece, the PAL-V flying car will really turn you into Batman
Figures that the concept for a flying car would come from the Netherlands, a country famous for their lax drugs laws and the only place you can wander into a coffee shop on the street and come out with a hash-soaked strawberry milkshake. Ahh, memories…
A Dutch inventor, John Bakker, has created a flying gyrocopter tricycle, or ‘Personnel Air Vehicle’ (PAL-V), which has been in development the past six years and even received funding from private investors.
According to Born Rich, the…
