Designed to appear and disappear in response to the needs of pedestrians, cyclists and drivers, this pedestrian crossing solution aims to make people safer through dynamic activation.

The interactive surface sits below high-impact plastic panels with lights triggered by monitoring cameras using smart technologies. The cameras identify crossing needs and adjust accordingly, lighting up zebra stripes that can widen at busy times of day (and widening them for particularly heavy foot traffic).

Like more sophisticated versions of traffic signals, the system can adapt and change as needed, instructing drivers when to yield or simply stop altogether. It can also be used to alert people to sudden shifts or unexpected obstacles, like a ball rolling into the street. Illumination levels can also be varied for maximum visibility by day and at night.

A recent full-scale prototype was deployed in West London by Umbrellium, a company founded by Usman Haque, who explains that “The pedestrian crossing that we know hasn’t really be updated since the 1940s, and these days we inhabit our cities in quite a different way. We have mobile phones in our hands that distract us, and our relationship to the city is very different.”

“The pedestrian crossing one of the most complex moments of interaction that almost everyone experiences on a daily basis. It’s that one moment where you’re actually negotiating with others as well as potentially as with big chunks of metal. We’re trying to create pattern sequences that unfold quite calmly so nobody’s surprised, it’s definitely not about distracting people, and the graphics themselves or notions on the surface look very familiar.”

“What we’ve tried to avoid telling people is that you must go here and that this is your area, but instead highlight the relationships between the people that are present in and around the crossing.” The goal is not to solve all crossing and street-related movement problems in one go, but to iterate on the design and figure out what solutions optimize for traffic flow as well as safety.

Cool and clever trump common sense and normal physics in this levitating record turntable, which aims to bring a vintage technology into the future.

Mag-Lev Audio wants to push audio technology in a new (vertical) direction, creating an “uplifting experience of music” in the form of the world’s first floating record player.

The device, the creators claim, not just about a look, but also the ability to “maintain the incredibly precise turning of the platter with sensor regulating software. Air is the smoothest medium with least amount of friction, which further elevates this project into a truly unique listening experience.”

Feet support the spinning platter when it is not in use while stored-up power can bring the system to a comfortable stop and lift the needle in case of an outage (instead of it dropping the floating disc uncontrolled).

The makers boast the simplicity of the system: “pick a favorite record; turn the turntable on; move the tone arm into position; and lower the cueing lever; then let the smart-record player do the rest.”

A series of LED lights and digital displays lend the entire setup an air of cyberpunk futurism as well, reinforcing the ambient aesthetic created by the floating form of the disk. Whether this approach will take off remains to be seen, but the gadget has already raised enough money on Kickstarter to make it happen.

Lighting up the night sky like artificial lightning, this incredible homemade lamp boasts a 90,000-lumen output (over 100 times that of a typical Maglite) that would put the flashiest high-beams on dark roads to shame, making nighttime scenes look uncannily daylit.

Constructed by RCTestFlight and published on YouTube, the project consists of ten 100-watt LEDs mounted on a heatsink and powered by twin 8 amp-hour, lithium-polymer batteries (about the equivalent energy of 10 mobile phones).

In the embedded video, you can see comparisons between car lights, streetlights, other handheld lamps and this flashlight, as well as demonstrations of lighting up clouds and mountains at a distance. Even the short-exposure shots reveal an incredible degree of brightness.

The rig uses ten 100-watt LED chips in a row, each connected to a large heatsink with bolts and thermal grease to help the heat transfer, each component tied to its own driver. Each LED has its own lens focusing light projection at around 60 degrees.

Made to burn fast and bright, the projection lifespan is accordingly limited: it can only run for about ten minutes and gets hot even faster than that. Cooling fans would be useful if longer blasts were needed, but for short bursts the system holds up just fine.

It shines bright in part due to LEDs trumping halogens, but also the various engineering details that help optimize for power and heat. The device can turn well-lit rooms into sun-bright spaces and even outdoors, at closer than 100 feet, it is basically blinding.

Opening this year in Newark, this 69,000-square-foot space will grow 2 million pounds of pesticide-free produce each year, turning an old steel factory into the largest indoor farm on the planet, 75 times more productive per square foot than open fields. This AeroFarms facility is to serve both as the company’s global headquarters as well as the anchor project for a Maker’s Village designed to grow business in the city and provide a prototype for scaleable urban agriculture.

Plants rooted in reusable microfleece cloth and stacked in modular planters will be sprayed by a nutrient mist and illuminated by LED lights. These crops require no soil, 95% less water and create no harmful runoff.  Located on a 3-acre industrial site in the Ironbound neighborhood, the structure will expand the role of affordable and local urban farming in the community and provide nearly 100 long-term jobs for residents. Such an approach offers a new potential future role to rundown industrial districts around the world, turning unused infrastructure in struggling cities into fresh indoor farming space.

More on the process and key materials: a “reusable cloth medium [supports] seeding, germinating, growing, and harvesting.” This critical cloth “has a number of benefits such as durability and reusability, increased cleanliness and sanitation, and the efficient harvest of a dry and clean product.”

In terms of LED innovation and efficiency, the company is “targeting specific wavelengths of light for more efficient photosynthesis and less energy consumption. LEDs can also be placed much closer to the plants, enabling greater vertical growing for even greater productivity per square foot.”

Aeroponics is the key to the solution, limiting the need for conventional watering and representing “a cutting-edge type of hydroponic technology that grows plants in a mist. The aeroponic mist most efficiently provides roots with the nutrients, hydration and oxygen needed, creating faster growing cycles and more biomass than other growing approaches. AeroFarms has designed its aeroponics as a closed-looped system, recirculating our nutrient solution and using over 95% less water than field farming.”

“We are delighted to introduce AeroFarms, a farming and technology leader, to the City of Newark, creating jobs for local residents and greater access to locally grown produce for our community,” said Ron Beit, founding partner and CEO of RBH Group. “AeroFarms will anchor our broader ‘Makers Village’ development project in the Ironbound neighborhood that will compete toe-to-toe with the Brooklyn Navy Yard in terms of a superior cost structure and greater transmodal access, bringing 21st century ‘maker-type’ businesses to Newark and the State of New Jersey.”

In this new video, Technical Illusions, the company behind CastAR, a hybrid augmented and virtual reality headset, shows off a series of amazing everyday applications of their technology, dissolving the distinction between real and digital spaces.

A year after raising $1,000,000 on Kickstarter, this technology combines but also goes beyond the AR of Google Glass and VR of Oculus Rift: “You and your friends can share this Mixed Reality experience that blends a virtual world into the real world. Move around naturally through this blended environment as you work or play together.”

In founding Technical Illusions and pushing out a viable product in just over a year, Jeri Ellsworth and Rick Johnson (formerly of Valve) have focused on getting something that works out the door and in the hands of users and developers as quickly as possible – in a world of possibilities, concepts and prototypes, their emphasis is refreshingly pragmatic.

The CastAR system consists of a headset with a built-in projector, camera and works in conjunction with retroflective surfaces embedded with infrared LED lights. “The projectors cast a three-dimensional image onto the surface, while the camera uses the LEDs to track your head movement … you can use this unique projected augmented reality technology to do things like view building projects in 3D, play interactive video games and create three-dimensional presentations.”