The Air Umbrella | Hacker News Reader

The Air Umbrella

yankodesign.com

15 pointsdelano11 comments

I'm not entirely sure how this can claim to be more "eco-friendly" than a normal umbrella given the energy costs required to power it (not to mention manufacture a battery and the entire device itself). When you're making a normal umbrella, the only energy cost comes when you manufacture the metal skeleton and fabric and put them together.

It's still a pretty neat idea though.

The motor to move enough air to repel rain while fitting in the bottom of that umbrella would be incredibly loud. Think vacuum cleaner cloud. It'd also only last a few minutes on any battery portable enough to carry around.

The concept also ignores the fact that thunderstorms are associated with high winds. It's air movement that creates the rain in the first place. The umbrella would be ineffective in anything more than a sun shower.

These were exactly my thoughts. It's rare to have rain without wind. Even a mild breeze would distort the shape of the 'umbrella'. Strong winds would require it be pointed into the wind as with any umbrella, however without a rigid structure the air curtain would virtually collapse flat providing no protection whatsoever.

To work in all weather this umbrella would have to be able to manipulate its output from virtually perpendicular to the shaft to parallel.

Honestly, this might work with compressed air, but that itself would present serious problems; you'd likely only be able to charge it once a day and the cylinder would be heavy, but perhaps not as heavy as the original design. It would also enable the umbrella to have a shaft similar in appearance to a regular umbrella.

This comment on the linked page pretty much summarizes my feelings too:

Every time I see such an idea where I think this is not thought through very well I expect to read a name from the far east when I scroll to the designer. Graphically nice work but please, PLEASE put more effort in your technical research and concept work.

Not long ago they have featured another concept that called for lifting a heavy weight to the top of a floor lamp and then letting it slide down on a long screw that connected the base of the lamp to its shade. Clearly wasn't designed by an EE major. Concepts of the thin as a paper phones with transparent screens, beautifully rendered every time, are also a dime a dozen on Yanko Design.

So I have long stop treating it as an industrial design blog per se, and now just flipping through it as a 3D Max design portfolio gallery.

How about using the diamagnetic properties of water as an umbrella? Make say a 20 tesla magnetic field above your head and the rain would get deflected away?

If everybody had such an umbrella, could we start zapping each other with lightning in the street? :-) (I must admit I have no idea what or how much 20 tesla are).

I can't find any references to the actual product so I'm not sure if it's a prototype or a real, saleable product; however, it's an interesting counterpoint to the "segway of umbrellas" post yesterday:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1055493

It looks like a concept sketch; I don't see any way you could fit a sufficiently powerful motor and power supply in that space-- and even if you could, heat and noise would still be a large problem.

In other words: I suspect it's from the same folks who promised us all flying cars and hoverboards...

Didn't Larry Niven have something like this on the fly-cycles in Ringworld? They were of course a lot more than just umbrellas... but still a sort of air cushion surrounding the user.

I believe that was to keep the atmosphere breathable for the occupant, as IIRC the fly-cycles were capable of going supersonic. The air cushion was to deflect the supersonic airflow around the occupant. I believe it was to act as a sort of light-weight cockpit. However, the pressure exerted to form the air cushion acted like an airbag too, so it should have definitely deflected rain, especially considering that it was likely designed to stop rainfall at supersonic speeds.

I can't really remember this with accuracy, it's been a while since I read the series.

Breathing... keeping hair dry... same thing :)

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