How can we enhance the experience
of urban flight itself?
Zephyr
2024-2025
Speculative design: industrial design, AR interaction and storyboard
People have dreamed of flying for as long as there have been birds to watch. Yet even after the invention of the aeroplane, flight remains rare in most people's daily lives. Zephyr imagines how flying alone through a city might feel in the future.
Speculative design: industrial design, AR interaction and storyboard
People have dreamed of flying for as long as there have been birds to watch. Yet even after the invention of the aeroplane, flight remains rare in most people's daily lives. Zephyr imagines how flying alone through a city might feel in the future.
Many visions of urban air travel fill the sky with games, concerts and virtual overlays. To me, these seemed to overshadow what makes flying enchanting in the first place. Thinking about why I love cycling, I looked for qualities worth keeping: the quiet company of others nearby, a sense of being present in a place, a state of focus, and the joy of moving freely in three dimensions.
Zephyr is a single-seat aircraft steered by three turbines, with a seated posture chosen over an earlier prone design for comfort. Its augmented-reality layer is light and bodily.
A clenched fist summons a flock of birds
whose
wingbeats follow the pilot's breathing; a wave of the hand sends ripples through them. Pilots can record a graceful manoeuvre and leave it hanging in the sky for 24 hours, or pick up "feathers" left by others: a destination tip, a mood message, a photo of yesterday's sunrise from the same spot.
credit:
Xueer Xu @alexstewart.000000012024