Skip to main content

"Urban Future" concept blurs lines between roads, sidewalks and city squares





Amongst the modern furniture and "design-art" on display at this year's Design Miami/ international design show visitors were also treated to the Bjarke Ingels Group's (BIG) vision for the future of urban mobility. Dubbed "Urban Future," the international architectural firm's installation, created with the cooperation of Audi, provided a glimpse of how its concept for the city street of the future that networks with vehicles and pedestrians might actually work.
 



 

While we've seen numerous concepts for networked vehicles that would communicate with infrastructure and have the ability to operate autonomously, such as GM's EN-V concept, the "Urban Future" concept is possibly the most eye-catching. The installation consists of a 185 meter square (1,991 square foot) section of road featuring a digitally programmable LED surface that uses 3D cameras to sense the movements of not only vehicles, but also pedestrians.




The installation is designed to provide a visual illustration of how a road of the future would sense and take into account the needs of various road users - motorized, pedal powered and pedestrian - and adapt to accommodate all, essentially blurring the line between roads, sidewalks and public spaces, such as city squares and allowing the road to change its function throughout the day.


The concept would see traffic flowing autonomously without the need for traffic lights or even the need for streets to be separated from sidewalks. Rather, the "road" would be a multifunctional space shared by vehicles and pedestrians, with the vehicles autonomously avoiding the pedestrians as they move around the space.

"If I imagine a city in 25 years, the street can change within one single day multiple times: from a pedestrian area to a highway, from the city square to meadow," said BIG founder Bjarke Ingels.



BIG created the concept in 2010 for the Audi Urban Future Award architecture competition, with the networked Audi A2 concept vehicle forming part of the installation. The LED road surrounds pedestrians with a glowing halo, while a trial is left behind the car as it moves and arrows are emitted from the front of the vehicle to show its future path. The path changes dynamically in response to the movement of pedestrians.

While some aspects of BIG's "Urban Future" concept might seem far fetched - LED roads probably aren't going to be appearing in city streets any time soon - it does provide some inspiration for what might be possible when truly autonomous vehicles become the norm. Instead of simply ferrying people from A to B on existing roads like robotic taxis, they could allow some of the space currently devoted to roads to be used for multiple purposes.
Source:https://newatlas.com/digital-roads/20738/

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Modular housing concept boasts 64 possible combinations

Italian Designer Gabriel Aramu has conceptualized a modular housing system that seems to offer endless possibilities. Dubbed "Sliding Hub," these prefabricated cubes join together to create a temporary housing solution for multiple situations. In the event that emergency shelters are required, the modules can be packed and transported to any destination. On arrival, the modules are easily joined together, with the flexibility to house individuals, small groups or large numbers without limitation. Each module incorporates an insulation system suitable for all kinds of weather conditions. In addition, the temporary accommodation units provide a comfortable standard of living, important to natural disaster victims. Constructed with steel reinforcements, numerous modules can be assembled together to create various sizes and shapes, whilst sliding them open creates large internal spaces. According to Aramu, the system can be configured 64 different ways, wh...
Post a Comment
Read more

How Lasers Can Preserve History

C leopatra’s Needle is an ancient Egyptian obelisk , but right now it looks like a construction project. Scaffolding snakes up the 69-foot spire as conservancy crews clear away 3500 years of soot and grime. Originally built in honor of Pharaoh Thutmose III, the obelisk has black streaks that mark its time spent buried near the Nile, its travel across the Atlantic, and near 130 years facing the pollution-filled elements in New York City. Now it’s getting a long overdue cleaning—using high-powered lasers. The Central Park Conservancy, the organization tasked with the upkeep of all monuments and works of art in Central Park, has had the needle’s cleaning on its to-do list since 2011. The Conservancy and personnel at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s photo studio began documenting the obelisk and assessing exactly what the monument needed. Soon conservators came in to test different types of cleaning techniques. “The typical ways of cleaning are using chemicals or micro-ab...
Post a Comment
Read more

If Tears Had Color

This is something that recently crossed my mind. If the reason we are crying would be connected to the color of our tears – what would it be? We all cry and not just for one reason, so how would it be if we could know the reason someone’s crying by the color of the tears? There is also a symbolic description of what each and every color presents, and it is proved that colors have influence of peoples feelings and emotions. There was an experiment on this – they put a man into the room with red walls (and everything else inside was red) and after a while when they let him out, he became noticeably more aggressive than he was before. And what do you think, why the hospital’s and other medical institution’s walls are green? It is said that the olive green color represents peace, which is especially needed in hospitals where everyone is sick and in panic for his/her own life and health. So, let’s go back to the subject, we know that our emotions as well as our tears are ...
Post a Comment
Read more