Tag Archives: personal mobility

Navee WaveFly 5X flying speedboat skims inches above water and needs no pilot license

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Personal mobility aircrafts are a continued obsession of the rich and the affluent, but the idea has remained pretty much curtailed to a few flying crafts popping up here and there. Now, the latest one to surface is designed as a cusp between a speedboat and a personal aircraft. It’s an aircraft but meant to remain exceptionally close to the water surface and fly at interesting speeds like a speedboat gliding above the water surface.

This is Navee WaveFly 5X, and it is designed in, yes right, China. Navee is a Chinese company that is known best for its electric scooters and has now created this two-person capacity aircraft. Touted as the world’s first consumer-grade wing-in-ground craft, it has a top speed of 53 MPH and is a novel flying experience that you cannot know until you have tried.

Designer: Navee

To try and experience the WaveFly 5X, Navee CEO took the aircraft for its first spin on Lake Taihu in Suzhou, eastern Jiangsu province. The low-altitude water mobility craft skimmed just above the water surface using ground-effect technology. The tech allows the craft to glide on a cushion of compressed air, which is trapped between the craft’s wings and the water below. So, this flying speedboat flies at about 53 MPH at only 30- to 50 cm above the water surface. The flight is smoother and without the bumps you experience in the speedboat riding over the wavy waters.

Personal mobility is obviously not a mass idea; the Navese craft is targeted at the luxury recreation market and those with a fondness for maritime transportation. The vehicle can be piloted without training or a license. It has a payload capacity of 140kg and offers a range of up to 50 miles (80 km). The craft is powered by hot-swappable batteries that can be recharged before you can prepare a cup of coffee and have it.

Being considerably lightweight to skim above the water surface, the WaveFly 5X is made from aerospace-grade carbon fiber. It does not need a runway to take off and land. It is designed more like a speedboat than an aircraft, and can therefore land and take off from over a calm waterway. All these features come for a premium price tag. The WaveFly 5x is priced at $199,999 and is available for pre-order now. You can have the craft customized in the color and accessories of your choice upon purchase.

Considering the hefty price and limited mobility, you’d expect that the Navee WaveFly 5X will not find many takers. But the company confirms that several distributors from various parts of the world have signed up with interest letters already. The launch via a test flight has definitely instilled more trust and confidence, and we are expecting to see more takers lining up in the near future.

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Honda UNI-ONE wheelchair finds innovative use in VR worlds as extended reality mobility experience

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Honda introduced the UNI-ONE personal mobility chair for people with lower limb immobilization at the end of 2022. The Segway-like version for people who want an advanced electric wheelchair contraption with flexible movement capabilities will officially debut at South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, Texas, next month, with a VR application twist.

The Japanese automaker will leverage the self-balancing personal mobility device (mostly intended for the disabled) for a seamless virtual reality world, which they are calling the “Honda Extended Reality (XR)” experience. The idea of fusing the real-world riding on the UNI-ONE with the virtual world environment sounds like a winning proposition, and Honda doesn’t want to let go of the opportunity.

Designer: Honda

The SXSW attendees will get the opportunity to get first-hand exposure to this unique VR experience from 10-13 March at Honda’s booth #729 at the SXSW Creative Industries Expo at the Austin Convention Center. This amalgam of two different technologies is directed towards solving the hardware limitation of a comprehensive metaverse reality that is otherwise only limited to the visual input and confined to a limited space. According to Hirokazu Hara, vice president of New Business Development, at American Honda Motor this will expand the “joy and freedom of personal mobility into entertainment applications.”

Hirokazu further added that the never-before thought of combination will elevate the multimodal immersive experience three-fold. The self-balancing tech dubbed Honda Omni Traction Drive System (HOT Drive System) and the advanced sensors on the 154 pounds UNI-ONE (permitting movement and tilt in any direction) will leverage a new VR and AR entertainment. This will shoot the extended reality technology and application development possibilities to another level, inducing the interest of early adopters more than ever before.

For instance, racing through a track on a virtual planet with lesser gravity than on Earth will be possible on a hands-free device capable of going at a top speed of 3.7 mph. The rig will combine the visual input from a VR headset and the freedom of movement to make the user feel as if racing on a real track in an alien landscape. The fact that Honda is vesting so much interest in this possibility with the UNI-ONE speaks a lot about how the future is going to pan out in the Metaverse world. According to Honda the extended reality (XR) technology will be perfect for malls, theme parks, or any other indoor or outdoor entertainment hubs with a lot of open space to move around.

The post Honda UNI-ONE wheelchair finds innovative use in VR worlds as extended reality mobility experience first appeared on Yanko Design.