Tag Archives: dystopian

This floating habitat concept captures carbon from the air and converts it into electricity!

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Carbon Capture Refuge X is a conceptual habitat that is a dystopian dream but in the best way possible! Yee envisions these to be floating structures that capture carbon from the air and convert it into electricity. It will be a community created for scientists and by scientists that sits within the Earth’s troposphere. Scientists in this habitat are working on environmental research but it will also be a space for refugees.

Each habit will feature solar panels and direct-air-capture fans that extract carbon from the atmosphere to be converted into electrical energy. The energy will run through neon strips within the structure’s floors, walls, and roofs. Yee describes these strips as “veins” designed to circulate utilities throughout the structure. They will also act like “muscles” that elongate to accommodate the system’s growth and open and close depending on the weather to allow air and natural light inside!

Carbon Capture Refuge X is an imaginative vision for a floating, technologically advanced future city. Even though the design seems like something you can only see in movies, it actually showcases achievable technologies such as carbon capture, which will have an important role to play in reversing climate change.

“War-ravaged by political upheaval and nearly rendered uninhabitable by natural disasters, earth’s refugees became ubiquitous. From the suffering and desperation, a manifestation to live with the earth and not just on the earth emerged. Scientists then developed a habitable living infrastructure known as Carbon Capture Refuge X. This living infrastructure simultaneously provided a sustainable way of living while filtering carbon out of the atmosphere,” explains Yee.

The design utilizes Earth’s magnetic field to suspend the habitable orb above the ground and sea, thus creating a floating structure in the troposphere.  Its physical form will be continuously evolving. Drones will be used for the distribution of goods to and between habitats. Far ahead in the future, Yee imagines that the orbs can be connected and plugged into one another.

Carbon Capture Refuge X will also feature rainwater collection which will be stored and filtered by vegetation and then used to supplement hydroponic farming. The vegetation creates a localized microclimate. There will also be a control centre that monitors the comfort, location, and communications of the habitat. The orbs now fill the sky with ecosystems without borders!

Designer: Bless Yee

The post This floating habitat concept captures carbon from the air and converts it into electricity! first appeared on Yanko Design.

This webcam literally looks and behaves like a human eye… because tech surveillance wasn’t creepy enough

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Remember when Sundar Pichai stepped on stage at Google I/O in 2018 and demonstrated how the virtual Google Assistant could make phone calls and have realistic conversations with people? It was a combination of scary and impressive, as Google’s voice AI literally spoke to a human, booking a haircare appointment at a salon. The virtual assistant’s manner of speaking was so incredibly natural, it could fool anyone into thinking it was a real human. The assistant’s voice had a natural speaking quality to it, with mannerisms, inflections, and even the occasional “ummm” and “ahhh” sounds to make it sound natural and human. The demo was a combination of incredibly impressive and incredibly scary, as it demonstrated how tech could easily cross over into human territory.

For people who still don’t feel tech is dystopian enough, here’s the Eyecam… a webcam that creepily stares right into your soul. In a world where tech spies on you (sometimes blatantly), the Eyecam adds a layer of realism to it. Designed by researcher Marc Teyssier, the Eyecam is more of a social project that aims at turning the humble camera into something more relatable – for better or for worse. The resulting device is eerily similar to an eye. Sure, it comes covered with faux flesh and has eyebrows and eyelashes, but the Eyecam doesn’t just look like an eye. It behaves like one too. The eyeball can independently pivot inside the eye socket, looking around the room. A facial-recognition software runs in the background, allowing the Eyecam to detect humans and look them directly in the eye. If that wasn’t creepy enough, the eyeball even has a tendency to move and jitter around like a human eye. It doesn’t stay absolutely still… instead, it looks and scans you, parts of your face, and intermittently shifts its gaze between your left and right eye. Oh, and it blinks too, feeling so real that your mind’s bound to feel extremely conscious of the camera’s gaze.

The Eyecam is more of an experiment than a real product. It aims at understanding, decoding, and tweaking the human-tech relationship. The camera behaves quite like a human eye would. Looking around the room before it spots you and stares directly into your eyes like another human. When the camera is resting, the eyelid shuts too, allowing you to feel a little more at ease around it. Obviously, when it wakes up and looks right at you, it feels slightly unnerving at first. I’m not sure how one would feel after months of using and getting used to the Eyecam… in fact, I’m not sure I even want to know, although it’s definitely something Teyssier is studying. Does the human tech relationship drastically change when the tech takes on a more human avatar? We’re comfortable with smartphone front-facing cameras casually pointing at us when we’re staring at our screens. What happens when that camera adopts a human appearance? How would our behaviors change if the surveillance around us felt that much more tangible?

If Black Mirror-esque dystopia excites you, you can actually build your own Eyecam from scratch. Marc’s been kind enough to document his entire process in great detail, and has even made hardware and software files available on Github. Just promise you won’t scare anyone to death! Remember, Big Brother’s always watching!

Designer: Marc Teyssier

The Eyecam comes built to scale, with remarkably human-like proportions and even details like skin-folds, wrinkles, and crow’s feet for that added realism.

The camera sits within an eyeball-shaped enclosure, which is rotated on multiple axes thanks to a series of motors and mechanisms that mimic the human eye’s randomized movement. *shudder*

Social experiment? Late April Fool’s Prank? Early Halloween experiment? You decide!

Architectural design renders that give us a glimpse into the future of humanity

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The year is 2200 and humans are split into two clans – the first clan believes in living with simplicity and letting nature heal itself (proof of which are the dolphins swimming in the canals of Venice) while the other half is where humanity struggles to exist without making a change to their behavioral patterns. Meet @inwardsound, an Italian 3D artist on Instagram who creates these surreal yet realistic views of our future, kind of like showing different versions of Earth in parallel universes where one twist in fate or act of man resulted in the new society that would be formed under their influence. Hauntingly beautiful, detailed and thought-provoking, each render here begs to ask the question – are you taking a step on the right path?

Living in cities, with homes that are so close by, we often know the person on the window opposite, they are practically our neighbors too! Habitat imagines a city where gravity is under control, so people reside on the land level and sky level (literally!) in this amazing view of what the world would be like if we run out of space in our cities. New York 2200 is here, and chances are, you will have a friendly neighbor above you as well!

Named the Hidden City, this render takes me to an alternate dimension where Inception meets overcrowding in a planet where humans chose not to improve their ways. Literally looking like a case of tunnel vision, the slightly submerged city and concrete landscape have taken over the majestic mountains in the distance, the Hidden City is humanity at its edge.

Any fans of the Philip K Dick novel converted to Amazon Prime series – The Man in the High Castle? This imaginative render feels like it belongs to the alternate universe described in the series (I have yet to complete it so no spoilers here!) but a more futuristic version of the same universe. Pagoda-inspired architecture stands tall in a dystopian setup, clearly establishing their dominance over the people. And the Avengers Infinity War-like alien spaceship hovers nearby, keeping the CNTRL HUB safe.

Be still my fiction-loving heart! J. R. R. Tolkien’s masterpiece ended with Sauron’s reign coming to an end, but imagine if he took over Middle Earth and led it into the future. The O-Towers here bring to my mind the eye of Saron, revised in a more modern avatar to keep scanning the world while their master rules with the Ring of Power by his side. I wonder who the new-age Frodo would be?

The city that stays green together, survives together. Green architecture is the need of the hour and looking at this render gives me some hope for the future. Eternal City here is a balanced ecosystem, where existing architectural structures support and nurture the plants growing on them and waterway is a common and accepted medium of transport in the sea-level rising waters.

There are islands and then there are floating islands. Fracture depicts a scene where these little bits of paradise look like green filtration/ cleansing pods that float through the center of the populated city, giving a breath of fresh air to those living in the dense urban situation.

Forgive me for the pop culture and series references, but these illustrations bring out my fictional flair! Altered Carbon altered my imagination of the future and the Upper City looks like the perfect place for the Meths to live in. Can’t you see them sit back and watch the general population live as they literally live above the less fortunate people? The Upper City concept seems a precursor to the time when the Meth’s build their homes in the sky. And truly, whether or not Altered Carbon materializes, I do see a version of the society where the rich live above the rest to not pay heed to their troubles.

Layers layer this society. Looking like an entryway to hell inspired by Dante’s Inferno, Layers showcases a society living in a socio-economic divide that, if history is a lesson, will keep getting harder to bridge.

Aptly named the Protected Area, this is maybe what our planet would look like if Tony Stark managed to get a shield around our world, safeguard us from those evil forces. Though Corona does look like a manifestation of Thanos right now, I wonder if these grids would be enough to save the plant from its real foes, humans.

The Trip brings to mind the Titanic’s worst nightmare! Because truly, what could be scarier than escaping a destiny of sinking to only catch fire later!