Tag: Dutch

If you thought it was cool that the Japanese police were using a drone with a net to capture rogue drones, check out what the police are doing in the Netherlands. Dutch cops are working with a company called Guard from Above to see if trained eagles can be used to snatch nefarious drones out of the sky.

If you tend to drive at night, you know that it can get dangerous on roads without lighting. That’s one of the reasons why some engineers in the Netherlands decided to make their highways glow in the dark.

It’s pretty common for big groups to go out and eat together, and then split the tab afterwards. But the process of splitting up the bill can be pretty tedious, since someone usually has to break out the calculator (or calculator app) and add up the amount that each person has to pay.

QR codes are slowly popping up pretty much everywhere, as most people carry a smartphone with a camera in it these days, and they can read these codes. Until now, I hadn’t seen any on money yet, but it looks like the Dutch have decided to put some on their newly minted coins.

The Fragile Future 2 lighting fixture really lives up to its name. You see, each tiny light source is actually framed by the seed pods of a dandelion. Now why is it called the Fragile Future 2?

Here’s a nifty clock that’s a bit more dynamic than what you’d typically see hanging on your wall. Depending on the angle you view it from, the face either shows simple hash marks or numerals around the dial.

This has got to be one of the most amazing clock designs I’ve ever seen. At first glance, the display looks like a bunch of random matchsticks, but over time, they gradually transform into words that tell the time.

This cool fabric curtain may look like a tree from afar, but once you’re up close, you’ll see that it’s made of tens of thousands of tiny ASCII characters. Created by Dutch designer Nienke Sybrandy, the huge (18′ x 11′) curtain panel was digitally printed with dot matrix characters to give the impression of intricate tree branches from a distance.

Sometimes it’s a bit of a challenge to tell the exact time on an analog clock. Sure, you can say “it’s about quarter-to-three”, but it really might be 2:47. This intricate wall clock tries to solve that problem by displaying every individual minute as a separate point on the dial.

These minimal lighting fixtures actually are designed to be shipped flat, like a postcard. Each lamp is actually a laser-cut sheet of aluminum with an embedded LED illumination source and powered by a single button battery.

This unusual art installation took hundreds and hundreds of individual cooling fans, and tied them together with sensors that detect the movements of passersby to produce an amazing visual and sensory experience. Dutch artist Daan Roosegaarde worked with a team of technical wizards to create this mammoth interactive work entitled Flow 5.0.

Here’s a really excellent retro-modern wall clock from Dutch designer Frank Clewits for design house Puhlmann. To tell time, the clock uses some unique, forward-facing Nixie vacuum tubes that poke out of the face of a brushed steel plate.

The guys over at dutch design firm OOOMS are best known for their wooden memory sticks, but here’s another interesting contraption that they also are responsible for. Looking like a treadmill on wheels, the Speedy Rollator uses a special gear drive system to multiply your walking efforts and increase your pace.

Remember those crummy old alarm clocks from the seventies that used numbers that flipped as the time changed? Dutch designer Wil van den Bos has reinvented the classic flip clock as a work of modern magnificence.

Slurpr may sound like another “Web 2.0” site, but it’s actually a piece of networking hardware. The beastly device, designed by Dutch hacker Mark Hoekstra, is designed to aggregate a bunch of Wi-Fi access points into one big fat high speed connection.

Dutch artist Lonneke Gordijn of Drift has created these beautiful little lights which create an amazing synergy between technology and nature. The Dandelight combines a 9-volt battery, an LED, phoshphorusbronze and a real dandelion head to create a fragile, but stunning light source.