Canadian Urbanism Uncovered
Read more articles by Todd Harrison
Two design students who hate bike helmets (one says they’re like “a hard mushroom on your head”) took it upon themselves to create something impossible: an invisible bicycle helmet. Their solution is deceptively simple, but it’s a bit less “invisible” than advertised; ultimately, if you want to protect yourself, some sort of protective fungi has to appear around your skull.
There are few elected officials who understand the politics of driving, with its brain stem triggers, quite as acutely as the Fords — first Rob, who...
By John Lorinc
Kensington Market: Heart of the City is a neighbourhood documentary that’s been in the making since 2016. “It’s really a look into the heart of the city...
By Shiri Yeung
In a recent ranking index, Toronto is listed as the third worst congested city in the world (after London and Dublin). The metric used by the company...
By Mahtot Gebresselassie and Tricia Wood
6 comments
Unfortunately the Hovding airbag helmets are 3998 Swedish krona, or almost $600 Canadian 🙁
An airbag for bicyclists. I get it!
Have to think about it.
I think they protest a bit too much about the uncomfortable “mushroom” on their heads — I put mine on and forget it’s there.
Pretty neat though, nonetheless.
I read an article on this a few weeks back and was over-the-moon. What an amazing piece of design and engineering.
But I think saying it’s an “invisible” bike helmet actually misses the really revolutionary qualities.
It’s a bike helmet that fits in a briefcase/backpack/purse/satchel–if you want people to wear helmets, making it easy to carry around with them is a massive win. Being one-size-fits-most (and being much easier to properly fit than a helmet) also makes helmet-sharing more viable. If they can switch from USB to near-field charging & status monitoring, these could even be provided at bixi stations.
And for most crashes, their studies show it actually doing a better job mitigating head injuries than a properly-worn traditional helmet!
Getting these into mass production and the price down could do a lot to increase cyclists’ safety on the injury-mitigation side of the coin.
A nice thing about helmets is they don’t need batteries.
This is really cool. But will probably remain in the expensive fancy gadget category.