The Eagle 360, a new tire design concept from Goodyear, is a rounded sphere held in place by magnetic fields and designed for a smoother ride in your future driver-free car.

The biggest advantage, of course, is omnidirectional steering capabilities, since the wheels have no orientation, unlike their forward-or-backward circular predecessors.

An organically-patterned, 3D-printed tread is designed to adapt like a sponge to different road conditions, while built-in sensor relay surface measurements to the onboard computer. Faster response times and immediate reaction capabilities in multiple directions all work toward improving passenger safety and comfort.

“By steadily reducing the driver interaction and intervention in self-driving vehicles, tires will play an even more important role as the primary link to the road,” said Goodyear’s senior vice president Joseph Zekoski.

“Goodyear’s concept tires play a dual role in that future both as creative platforms to push the boundaries of conventional thinking and test beds for next-generation technologies.”

Innocuous spheres by day, the carefully handmade holes dotting these coconut shells are hard to even see until they light up at night, morphing from muted balls to bright orbs.

Once illuminated, these subtle spheres are themselves beautifully lit up from within, but also project amazing patterns on surrounding walls, furniture and furnishings, whether set on the floor or placed on a bookcase or nightstand.

Creator Vainius Kubilius explains their constituent parts in anatomical terms – bones (of metal wire) to create a strong and flexible stand, wrapped with skin (of various ropes) to create a tactile exterior, with a head and brain (custom drilled coconut) unique in each case and giving personality to the whole.

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Magnifying light by a factor of 10,000, this liquid-filled, sun-tracking, energy-harvesting glass sphere is so powerful that it can not only harvest solar rays directly but is even able to draw power from reflected lunar light. Its high efficiency comes from the motion of its panning capture apparatus as well as the nearly-lossless concentration of thermal energy.

André Broessel is the European architect and engineer behind this weatherproof energy harvesting system that turns light into heat. It is in many regards more robust, efficient and versatile than traditional photovalics, concentrating available light sources and multiplying their thermal effect (click to enlarge the diagram below for a better understanding of the basic system).

Made to be mounted on buildings individually or in arrays, a computerized control system passively tracks available illumination in the day, but can also follow and be fueled by moonlight.

The balls can work both to generate power and as replacements to traditional window apertures, creating a wide variety of potential hybrid architectural applications as well.

Finally, this video “is an introduction to Rawlemon Solar Energy Generator. It shortly explain the principles of our patent pending micro tracking system, and few applications we are working on” – for more, visit their website here.