james dyson

Dyson levels up in the U.S. with two new '2 Tier Radial' vacuums

The inside of a vacuum cleaner is no place to be. Luckily, most of us will never have to endure such a place. The detritus we create in daily living, however, is another story. Not only do we want dust, dirt, and pet hair to be subjected to the internal whirlwind of a vacuum cleaner, we want it to stay there. At least until it's time to empty the bin.

Emptying the bin may be the last step in the journey for particulate matter, but other side of the story is just beginning. The bagless technology that Dyson uses … Read more

BlindSpot: Smart cane concept looks to future

Driven by the oft-overlooked needs of the visually impaired, Selene Chew wanted to develop something that would improve their social lives. She came up with the concept of BlindSpot, which looks like a normal white cane, but integrates a mobile phone.

You could say the device--Chew's final-year industrial design thesis project at the National University of Singapore--is a smart cane.

Instead of a screen, users navigate the menu with a tactile navigator and listen to audio cues via a Bluetooth headset. Both the headset and phone can be charged wirelessly.

Like most of today's smartphones, BlindSpot has built-in Wi-Fi, 3G, and GPS connectivity. … Read more

Buoyancy bazooka could save lives at sea

So simple, yet so brilliant. Designer Samuel Adeloju's clever little idea of a life-saving ring that can be "shot" out to someone in danger of drowning beyond the reach of a simple toss has won him 10,000 pounds ($15,890) in the James Dyson Award against 14 finalists. The international design award aims at inspiring young people to design something that solves a problem.

Given that Adeloju hails from surf-happy Australia, one can guess at the inspiration floating his boat. The Longreach Buoyancy Deployment System works on the idea of a bazooka-like device that can fire … Read more

Dyson unveils blade-free fan

At first glance, James Dyson's latest invention looks like a powerful HD antenna or perhaps a small portal into another world. But in fact, the device, which carries the vaunting title of Dyson Air Multiplier, is something much more common: a fan.

What, a fan with no blades? Yes, that's exactly what you're looking at, and what makes the Air Multiplier so hard for people to classify at first. This fan uses some innovative airflow engineering to pull air up through an energy-efficient brushless motorbase and multiply it 15 times, expelling it through an airfoil-shaped ramp at a rate of 118 gallons a second, according to the press release.

Dyson, the company, says its fluid dynamics engineers spent four years "running hundreds of simulations to precisely measure and optimize the machine's aperture and airfoil-shaped ramp" and air fluctuations were mapped with something called a Laser Doppler Annometry. … Read more