What an Average Day Looks Like with 18 of the Weirdest Inventions Ever

For years, Donna had been desperate to get a good night’s sleep. The trouble: her husband. He snored. Like a freight train. Donna tried the standard gives: earplugs for her( disagreeable and ineffective ), cheek police and nose thingamajigs for him( ditto ), and jostle him( again, ditto ). Then she heard about a really out-there solution called the Motion Pillow.

Made by Korean company TenMinds, the pillow has four pressure-sensing airbags that connect to an outside microphone on a nightstand. Once the mic identifies her hubby shaking the shingles, it automatically inflates the airbags, which gently reposition his head until he stops appreciating enters. Donna doesn’t ever go for the expensive gadgets–inexpensive ones are another matter–but when she heard that the Motion Pillow won an Inventions Award 2020 from the Consumer Technology Association, she decided to take the $378 immerse. And it wreaks! In actuality, when she’s mad at her husband, she makes snoring clangs just so the pillow will take his head on a roller-coaster ride.

These periods, her husband’s snoring no longer wakes Donna up–some strange woman does: “Morning, Champ! Remember, all our dreams can come true if “were having” the firmnes to pursue them! ” Who is this ridiculously peppy morning person? It’s Donna’s brand-new alarm clock. Bitten by the gadget bug, Donna bought the Ruggie for $69. It’s the only clock that does her out of bed–quite literally.

Aside from cereal, Kernza( above left) has also been used in bread and snacks–and beer.

First, it stirs her use music, those vivacious oaths of affirmation, or an alarm that can stumbled 120 decibels–a din akin to a pneumatic instruct. When Donna reaches for the catnap button, she is confronted by the fact that the Ruggie doesn’t have one. To make it stop, she has to haul herself out of berthed and stand on a foam mat–the “rug” in Ruggie–for up to 30 seconds. At that stage, she is soundly awake.

Now that you know all about Donna’s sleeping practices, here’s something else you should know about her: She’s not real. But all the manoeuvres she encounters in this story are. A few are still in the development stage, but most are available right now. They might not change the world or their own lives, but the issue is delicious in their own quirky modes. Even if you wouldn’t benefit from owning, say, a robot designed to help out in the bathroom( more on that below ), it’s exceedingly recreation to read about the strange things that marketers and inventors are coming up with.

Which introduces us back to Donna. As it happens, she has high cholesterol, and her weakness for bacon doesn’t help. Fortunately, a prof at England’s hallowed University of Oxford is developing the Bacon Patch. It’s a nicotine-style patch you wear on your forearm; scratch it, and it releases an savor redolent of fatty, bacony goodness. “Studies has been demonstrated that odor can reduce food cravings, ” holds its founder, Charles Spence. Really? That reeks fishy to some skeptics. “If I can smell bacon, ” one feral bacon eater told the Telegraph when it reported on the faux-porcine product, “I’ll want to eat bacon.”

Donna’s actual healthful breakfast is a non-earth-shattering bowl of Honey Toasted Kernza Cereal from Cascadian Farm. Developed by Kansas’s nonprofit Land Institute, Kernza is a new grain that has been touted as a possible savior for our warming planet. Because it’s a perennial–unlike wheat, oats, and barley–it suctions greenhouse gases from the breeze and traps them in its roots, much like a tree. It also robs up nitrogen, a fertilizer ingredient that has been blamed for polluting creeks and flows.( Not a cereal being? Patagonia Provisions stimulates beer with Kernza. Talk about the breakfast of endorses .)

Alas, Kernza is high in fiber, so off to the shower Donna exits. “Poop anxiety is real, ” a spokesperson for Charmin, the toilet paper brand, told CNN. And Donna agrees, especially when, after deporting her business, she realizes she’s out of toilet paper. She calls to her husband, but of course he’s still asleep. So she shells up the Charmin app on her telephone, and the Rollbot comes to the rescue. Using infrared sensors, the self-balancing robot decorated with a teddy suffer face arrives suffering a prized rotation of preloaded bathroom tissue.( Alas, Charmin has stirred exclusively one Rollbot still further .)

Saved by the robot, Donna continues to get ready for her day. She opens her dresser drawer and drags out a duo of Sensoria Smart Socks. The socks ($ 199 — OMG !) have a dock for a microelectronic microchip that wirelessly relays data about cadence, speed, heart rate, and more to an app on Donna’s phone. You can’t wear low-tech shoes with high-tech socks, so Donna likewise bought a $400 duet of self-lacing sneakers, the Adapt BB 2.0, which were created by Nike for competitors( NBA star Ja Morant of the Memphis Grizzlies wore them ). All Donna need do is insert her hoof into the sneaker, and digital sensors inside the sole do the residue by deducing her hoof length and automatically closing around it.

Donna may be in good shape, but her pudgy pets could use some help. For her bird-dog, she bought the iFetch ($ 115 ), a small blue-and-white machine that sits on the floor and automatically propels a tennis ball up to 30 paws. The dog retrieves the chunk and removes it into the hole at the top, and the iFetch launches it again.

When felines dream, they visualize themselves slinking the Serengeti stalking wildebeests. So Donna bought Kitty the ProFlight Panthera Cat Toy Drone. As its identify connotes, it’s a monotone, but this $ 100 rarity flies around the room jiggle a small toy for the cat to chase. It even has a built-in camera so Donna can watch Kitty from her phone. Donna’s not concerned about the damage a drone might cause indoors because certapet.com assured her that “the safety pieces, including a crash shunning organization and automobile altitude, help protect you from flying the drone into your cat or surroundings.”

The Adapt BB 2.0 sneakers sitting atop their charging pad.

Before leaving the house, Donna stops to write a note for her hubby. She contacts for a pad and her favorite confine ever, the Air-Ink from Graviky. The pen( available only as a example) literally writes with polluted aura from captured carbon emissions. A cylindrical maneuver announced KAALINK fits around a car’s tailpipe and captivates up to 99 percentage of its black particulate matter, which in turn is converted into inks and coats. “Pollution is bad, ” Graviky cofounder Anirudh Sharma told Time magazine. “But pollution happens to be a really good raw material to shape inks.”

Donna opens the door to a beautiful epoch. If she were wearing the Mojo Lens, a smart-alecky augmented reality( AR) contact lens from Mojo Vision, she’d know it was 72 grades outside because the lens would tell her. Donna has been begrudging one for a while, though it’s not for sale more. The lens is activated by eye movement and powered by a microscopic battery that lives on the lens itself. Microelectronics are used to project idols on the tiniest of built-in spectacles. Customers can call up information, move through verse, and even watch videos.

Because “the technology fades away when you want to focus on the world around you, ” says Mojo Vision CEO Drew Perkins( the lens hides whatever was being displayed ), it clears ambling the busy streets safe, unlike when you’re looking at your smartphone. Which, fortunately, Donna doesn’t happen to be doing at the moment–or else she would be necessary to clipped by a speeding suitcase gunning for her at six mph.

That’s right: Created by a Chinese fellowship announced ForwardX Robotics, the Ovis Suitcase ($ 640) is a self-propelled carry-on that uses cameras, facial-recognition technology, and a tracking algorithm to travel hands-free with its owner, by-passing crashes as it wends its space through hordes. “Essentially, ” says Nicolas Chee, benefactor and CEO of ForwardX, “we’ve given the Ovis Suitcase a duo of noses and a brain.” It’s like luggage and a baby all in one, but you don’t have to pick up after the suitcase.

The Ovis does a U-turn and returns to Donna, this time accompanied by its owner, a German tourist. He contains two Ambassador earpieces, audio manoeuvres with built-in microphones that change on the spot. He frames one earpiece over his ear, and Donna does the same with the other. He expects in German how to get to the train station, but Donna hears the question in English. She responds in English, and he nods, perceive everything since her oaths are communicated in German. The two could have spoken in Japanese, Mandarin, or Hebrew–the Ambassador converts 20 speeches and 42 lexicons. Donna offers the tourist and his Ovis auf Wiedersehen, then treads to her favorite eatery and seizures a table.

Minutes later, her friend recruits the eatery wearing stylish sunglasses. “Elaine! ” Donna calls out. Elaine slowly ambles over and takes a seat without assistance, singular because she is blind. Since she was fitted with the Orion Visual Cortical Prosthesis System from California-based Second Sight, she has led a more active life.

The Ovis Suitcase’s battery allowed to to reliably follow its owner for up to 13 miles.

Those stylish sunglasses carry a camera and video-processing unit( VPU ). Implanted in the visual cortex of Elaine’s brain is a tiny chip containing 60 electrodes. The wireless VPU proselytizes personas from the camera into electrical pulsings, which are transmitted to the electrodes on Elaine’s brain, which then figures out what she is looking at. People and objects appear as dots of glowing. “You don’t even need to have eyes for the invention to work, ” says Nader Pouratian, MD, PhD, a neurosurgeon at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center who has implanted the machine in patients. Elaine was sold when she learned from onezero.medium.com that its participation in a clinical trial was able “to see his birthday candles for the first time in more than seven years.”

The waitress comes by, and Elaine successions an Hopeless Burger. Tempted by a bacon cheeseburger at the next table, Donna chooses again that she had that Bacon Patch. Instead, she tells a salad, and the two chat apart. Elaine braggings about the trip her son took: He rode a bicycle across a lake.

Well , not exactly. He rode a Manta5 Hydrofoiler XE-1 Bike, which digitaltrends.com announces “the unholy offspring of a boat, an airplane, and an e-bike.”( It also has an unholy price tag: $8,990.) Instead of rotates, the Manta5 is “equipped with a situated of hydrofoils, which essentially function like backstages in the sea. As you pedal and spur the motorcycle forward, liquid surpass over these backstages and starts filch, much like airplane offstages appoint lift.” One customer recall affirms, “It really is like flying on spray! ”

After lunch, Donna leaves Elaine to run an errand. As she’s crossing the street, she gets a text from her husband: “How do I turn off the @$%^ iFetch ?! ” With her intelligence buried in her telephone, she texts back, “I’m coming home !! ” Donna’s an irreformable “twalker, ” someone who textbooks while sauntering, and this time it’s not a suitcase but a automobile that almost get her.

She knows she has a hazardous habit–pedestrian fatalities are climbing–but is happy about the protection on the way. Fred Jiang, aide prof of electrical engineering at Columbia University, works out the cricks on his Smart Headphones. When they’re perfected, four miniature microphones will “differentiate gondola phones from background racket, ” says mashable.com, and work with an app to calculate the interval and outlook of cars in order to alert wearers when they are in danger of being run down. That wonderful performance to Donna.

Back home, she swaps off the iFetch and affiliates her frazzled partner on the couch to watch TV. But the screen is nowhere in sight. Donna taps a button on a remote, and a 65 -inch screen unfurls from a rectangular box sitting on a stand, “emerging gloriously like an amusement cobra from a basket, ” says cnet.com. It’s an early form of the not-yet-available LG Signature OLED TV R9. Kept erect by countless thin high bar and a duo of riser forearms on its back, the screen can be raised some 50,000 experiences before potentially breaking down from wear, according to LG.

The Manta5 water bike can slice through water at 13 mph.

Donna’s husband puts an limb around her. Overcome with cherished for him, snoring and all, she wants to tell him how she feels. But their smart-alecky orators and virtual assistants, such as Amazon Echo and Google Home, may be listening, so she opens a coffee counter drawer, draws out the Bracelet of Silence, and slips it on her wrist.

The brainchild of Ben Zhao and Heather Zheng, married computer science profs at the University of Chicago, this piece of “digital armor, ” as the New York Times calls it, “will jam the Echo or any other microphones in the vicinity from listening in on the wearer’s conversations.” Not hitherto on sale, the large, clunky plastic cuff is speck with 24 small speakers that emanate imperceptible ultrasonic signals to jam prying microphones.

After whispering sweet nothings into her husband’s ear, Donna calls up Amazon Prime Video and prescribes a classic, Casablanca. Sometimes the old material is still the good stuff.

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