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This post is brought to you by Strelka Institute. During the new academic year Strelka students will answer the question: ‘What has become “The New Normal” in the modern world?’Strelka Institute for architecture, media and design launched the enrollment campaign for the postgraduate... View full entry
This post is brought to you by IN(3D)USTRY From Needs to Solutions. The first edition of IN(3D)USTRY From Needs to Solutions, which took place from June 21st to June 23rd 2016 at Fira de Barcelona, successfully introduced an entirely new concept for exploring the possibilities offered by additive... View full entry
Airbus appears to be serious about its "Vahana" project, aimed at creating an autonomous passenger drone network, and thinks testing can begin as early as 2017. [...]
Airbus is also working on a drone delivery service [...] and plans to start testing it at a Singapore university by mid-2017. The cargo-laden vehicles fly automated routes in "aerial corridors," then drop them off and send delivery notifications to customers.
— Engadget
Airbus engineers are dreaming up no small endeavor as laid out in the company's Future of Urban Mobility vision: "Imagine landing at a major international airport after a long flight in an A380. Instead of suffering through a 90-minute taxi ride in the megacity’s gridlocked traffic, you hop into... View full entry
This post is brought to you by Yulio. There’s no denying it: Virtual Reality (VR) creates a buzz. It’s exciting and attention-grabbing. It attracts and then holds. And keeps holding. Wherever you go, a pair of goggles instantly draws a crowd.For businesses in the Architecture and Interior... View full entry
Starting later this month, Uber will allow customers in downtown Pittsburgh to summon self-driving cars from their phones, crossing an important milestone that no automotive or technology company has yet achieved. Google, widely regarded as the leader in the field, has been testing its fleet for several years, and Tesla Motors offers Autopilot [...] But none of these companies has yet brought a self-driving car-sharing service to market. — Bloomberg
Related stories recently in the Archinect news:Google, Uber, Lyft, Ford and Volvo join forces to lobby for autonomous vehiclesA look at the history and future of the American commuteNew study finds ride-sharing apps like Lyft and Uber have no effect on drunk-driving fatalities View full entry
We are overloaded daily with new discoveries, patents and inventions all promising a better life, but that better life has not been forthcoming for most. In fact, the bulk of the above list targets a very specific (and tiny!) slice of the population. As one colleague in tech explained it to me recently, for most people working on such projects, the goal is basically to provide for themselves everything that their mothers no longer do. — Allison Arieff | the New York Times
Last year Allison Arieff served as a juror on our competition, Dry Futures. Revisit some of the winners of the competition:And the winners of Archinect's Dry Futures competition, "Pragmatic" category, are...And the winners of Archinect's Dry Futures competition, "Speculative" category, are...And... View full entry
Moscow City Hall has announced the launch of its own version of online game “Pokemon Go.” Russians will be asked to find and "catch" historical figures in the streets of the capital via an app called “Know Moscow.Photo.”
[...] people will be able to catch and take a selfie with [...] Yury Gagarin, Alexander Pushkin, Pyotr Chaikovsky, [founder of the first Russian university] Mikhail Lomonosov, Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Napoleon Bonaparte and the tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich,” [...]
— The Moscow Times
Related stories in the Archinect news:No, Pokémon Go is not an urban fantasy for the new flaneurMoscow's metro expansion moves ahead of scheduleMoscow's iconic Shukhov Tower added to World Monuments Fund Watch List View full entry
This post is brought to you by Yulio. AN INTRODUCTION TO VIRTUAL REALITY Though Virtual Reality (VR) is yet to truly break into the mainstream consumer market, it’s an industry growing at breakneck speed.With Deloitte Global predicting a $1bn year for the VR industry this year, and Digi Capital... View full entry
Sidewalk Labs, a secretive subsidiary of Alphabet, wants to radically overhaul public parking and transportation in American cities, emails and documents obtained by the Guardian reveal.
Its high-tech services, which it calls “new superpowers to extend access and mobility”, could make it easier to drive and park in cities and create hybrid public/private transit options that rely heavily on ride-share services such as Uber.
— the Guardian
"But they might also gut traditional bus services and require cities to invest heavily in Google’s own technologies, experts fear."In related news:Google's Sidewalk Labs contemplates building an entire cityU.S. says computers qualify as drivers in Google's autonomous vehicles; won't even have to... View full entry
Columbus, Ohio, has won a $50m prize for its plans to smarten up its transport system. The money is made up of a $40m Smart Cities grant from the Department of Transportation (DOT), a $90m fund put up by private sector partners and a further $10m from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s charity Vulcan, which will be used to finance electric vehicle infrastructure. — globalconstructionreview.com
Columbus managed to beat six rival cities that were shortlisted by the DOT earlier this year:Austin, TexasDenver, ColoradoKansas City, MissouriPittsburgh, PennsylvaniaPortland, OregonSan Francisco, CaliforniaRelated stories in the Archinect news:Imagining the future cyberattack that could bring... View full entry
If Mr. Ratti’s projections are correct, and self-driving cars can radically reduce traffic without cannibalizing existing mass transit—the hypotheticals pile up—it is possible that self-driving cars will make many cities livable in a way they aren’t now. Imagine if every U.S. city had a hybrid public-private mass-transit system on par with those in New York City or Washington, D.C., comprised entirely of self-driving vehicles. — wsj.com
Related stories in the Archinect news:Would self-driving cars be useful to people living outside urban cores?The "algorithmic dreams" of driverless cars, and how they might affect real-world urban designHow prepared are American cities for the new reality of self-driving cars? View full entry
The growing interest in blockchain has morphed its concept into something new. Before, the blockchain was simply the spine of the bitcoin network, but today the technology is being used on a burgeoning list of distributed ledgers with varying degrees of openness, security and complexity.
[...]
Ethereum, a public blockchain platform created by Russo-Canadian programmer Vitalik Buterin...proposes to do away with middlemen everywhere, not just in finance.
— Wired
"Ethereum is a blockchain on steroids designed for more than trading cryptocurrency units or ‘coloured’ assets: developers can use it to build programs that interact with the world based on public rules enshrined in so-called smart contracts."Some architects are already working on utilizing... View full entry
Hyper-Reality is a concept film by Keiichi Matsuda. It presents a provocative and kaleidoscopic new vision of the future, where physical and virtual realities have merged, and the city is saturated in media. — hyper-reality.co
"Our physical and virtual realities are becoming increasingly intertwined. Technologies such as VR, augmented reality, wearables, and the internet of things are pointing to a world where technology will envelop every aspect of our lives. It will be the glue between every interaction and... View full entry
Some people think VR is a second class reality. I am not sure of that — aeon.com
There are some convincing points here by Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist David Chalmers. Just imagine how the humanities future is being shaped by the fast developing technologies. View full entry
If the founders of a new face recognition app get their way, anonymity in public could soon be a thing of the past. FindFace, launched two months ago and currently taking Russia by storm, allows users to photograph people in a crowd and work out their identities, with 70% reliability.
It works by comparing photographs to profile pictures on Vkontakte, a social network popular in Russia and the former Soviet Union, with more than 200 million accounts.
— the Guardian
"In future, the designers imagine a world where people walking past you on the street could find your social network profile by sneaking a photograph of you, and shops, advertisers and the police could pick your face out of crowds and track you down via social networks."For related content:France... View full entry
