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.
Video: The invisible bicycle helmet
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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.