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. As it turns out the eagles are able to instinctively capture a drone and take it to a place away from people on the ground.

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. Named for its similarity to clocks which appear in train stations around Europe, the Station Numbers Hologram clock was designed by Dutch designers Ruben van Boxtel & Reinier Buijs for Karlsson. And while I’m not really sure that the display counts as a true hologram, there’s definitely some sort of lenticular printing illusion used to produce the effect.

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. Conceived by Dutch industrial designer Christiaan Postma, the clock goes beyond the simple dial and number paradigms we’re all used to seeing, and really thinks outside of the box.

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. Looking like a cross between a clock and a Sputnik satellite, the TikTak clock by Dutch designers Niels van Eijk and Miriam van der Lubbe makes a strong visual statement.

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. Created by Dutch designer Sander Mulder (formerly of revered design house Buro Vormkrijgers), the Eureka lamp is completely self-contained, and can be easily mailed in an envelope, then hung from the ceiling using string or wire. Alas, the brilliant Eureka lamp is still just a prototype concept, and has not been produced for the masses.

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. For starters, the Bomba Alarm Clock has rid itself of those boring plain-Jane digits and updated them into a hip post-modern typeface.

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. The device automatically seeks out the six strongest open Wi-Fi channels, connects to all of them, and combines the signals into a massively fast ‘net 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.