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Category: transportation – Page 604

If the Airbus patent ever becomes reality, this boarding style would be a thing of the past. (Photo: Thinkstock)

Unless you’re deathly afraid of planes, one of the worst things about flying is the sheer tedium of it. It’s nothing but indeterminate waiting — waiting for security, waiting to board, waiting to reach your destination.

Airbus has just been granted a patent for a wild new way to try to speed up boarding on planes — and as Ars Technica points out, it’s just like something out of the classic kids TV show Thunderbirds.

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A ‘head-up’ display for passenger vehicles developed at Cambridge, the first to incorporate holographic techniques, has been incorporated into Jaguar Land Rover vehicles.

Cambridge researchers have developed a new type of head-up display for vehicles which is the first to use laser holographic techniques to project information such as speed, direction and navigation onto the windscreen so the driver doesn’t have to take their eyes off the road. The – which was conceptualised in the University’s Department of Engineering more than a decade ago – is now available on all Jaguar Land Rover vehicles. According to the researchers behind the technology, it is another step towards cars which provide a fully , or could even improve safety by monitoring driver behaviour.

Cars can now park for us, help us from skidding out of control, or even prevent us from colliding with other cars. Head-up displays (HUD) are one of the many features which have been incorporated into cars in recent years. Alongside the development of more sophisticated in-car technology, various companies around the world, most notably Google, are developing autonomous cars.

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Self-driving cars could disrupt the airline and hotel industries within 20 years as people sleep in their vehicles on the road, according to a senior strategist at Audi.

Short-haul travel will be transformed and the hassle of getting to and from airports eliminated, said Sven Schuwirth, vice president of brand strategy and digital business at the German car brand.

Business travellers will be able to avoid taking domestic flights to meetings and will sleep and work in their cars en route instead of checking into city-centre hotels, he said.

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“I believe the children are our future,” philosopher Whitney Houston once opined. Well, if she was talking about car design, she wasn’t wrong.

OK, not ‘children’ exactly. But certainly students. Audi has today unveiled the results of its ‘Design Universe’ think-tank, in which young designers at four top universities have explored how the Audi of tomorrow might look.

Take the car above, as an example. It’s called the Audi Quantum, and was designed by a pair of students at the Scuola Politecnica di Design in Milan. Looks suitably futuristic, no? There are retina scanners that, um, scan the driver’s retina and configure the interior settings before he or she climbs in.

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There are probably plenty of things that frustrate you about air travel, but waiting to take off or disembark is probably high on your list. Why should you have to board well before the plane is ready to get moving? Airbus might have a way to cut that idle time to near zero, though: it recently received a patent for a detachable passenger cabin that would lift into the airport gate. Your aircraft would only show up when it’s actually ready to go, and would spend far less time on the ground as a whole (as it’s just swapping cabin pods). It could also eliminate the convoluted boarding process, since you could take your seat right away instead of forming a queue in the terminal.

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Derek Muller of ‘Veritasium’ explores the impact of the Northeast blackout of 2003 and the innovations in energy that are essential to keeping the lights on. For more on the future of energy, check out Breakthrough’s ‘Energy on the Edge’ episode on the National Geographic Channel airing Sunday 11/29 at 9/8c.

Check Out Veritasium’s ‘How Long Will You Live’: http://bit.ly/21fLyDN

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