Cryoscope lets you feel your forecast
Robb Godshaw, an industrial design student at Rochester Institute of Technology, demonstrates a haptic weather forecaster called the Cryoscope.
Weather forecast icons can be cryptic. There's only so much that can be communicated by a picture of a gray but-not-too-gray cloud with some raindrops and a sun poking out behind it.
All you really want to know is, "Am I going to freeze my nuts off out there?"
Enter the Cryoscope, an invention that allows you to feel the temperature of tomorrow's forecasted air.
Created by Robb Godshaw, an industrial design student at Rochester Institute of Technology, the Cryoscope uses an aluminum cube to house a heat sink, a thermoelectric-cooling Peltier element, and a cooling fan, all operated by an Arduino controller that receives forecast data from a Web-based app.
I can't help imagining this next to The Molly sweet-dispensing tweet bot and the Little Printer, which curates your online subscriptions and spits them out as a bite-size newspaper. Maybe the future will be full of these little single-purpose boxes reporting the outside world's info into our homes.