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Category: transportation – Page 108

Solar-powered airship will circle the world non-stop without fuel

Zero-emissions long-distance aviation is absolutely possible… Provided you’re not in a hurry. Solar Airship One will take 20 days to fly all the way around the equator, some 40,000 km (~25,000 miles), in a single zero-emissions hop.

The 151-m (495-ft)-long airship will have its entire upper surface covered in solar film – some 4,800 square meters (51,700 sq ft) of it, or about nine-tenths of an NFL football field for those of you who prefer the standard units.

By day, the solar panels will run the airship’s electric propulsion systems, while also banking up extra power for the overnight haul by electrolyzing water into hydrogen. By night, the hydrogen will run through a fuel cell, providing the juice to keep going.

AI Hype – LG CES New AI Buzzwords and a Future Self-Driving Concept Car

Prototypes, slideware and vaporware is easy. LG showed a cool prototype self driving concept car at CES 2024. There was also new AI marketing buzzwords and AI promises.

The concept car has swiveling seats so that passengers can look at any direction. There were also great LG screens to immerse passengers with video.

Real AI is emerging this year but there will also be a lot of AI Hype.

Zeiss brings holograms to the mass market

While already deployed for the likes of NASA and ESA for several years, Zeiss’ hologram-generating Multifunctional Smart Glass technology is only now gearing up for mass production. The results could be interesting.

Zeiss’s Multifunctional Smart Glass has been a core and expensive bespoke component of space missions for some years now, the tech having been developed primarily for deployment with the likes of NASA and ESA that can afford it for mission-critical uses. Calling what it results in a hologram is a bit of a cheat — these images don’t float free on their own; instead, they’re generated within a thin, transparent layer sandwiched between glass sheets to which ultra-high-precision optics are attached.

Still, the effect is convincing. The image layer is 92% transparent. Zeiss reckons the holographic functionality can turn any glass surface (windows of buildings, transparent screens, side windows of vehicles, etc) into an on-demand communication screen.

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