INNOVATIONS THAT WILL CHANGE YOUR TOMORROW....... 4, 5 AND 6

INNOVATIONS THAT WILL CHANGE YOUR TOMORROW....... 4, 5 AND 6

 4. Room as a Monitor

The problem with laptops and tablets, says Mark Rolston of the design firm Frog, is that they’re confined by a screen. He wants to turn the entire room into a monitor, where you can have the news on your kitchen table while you place a video call on your fridge. And when you’re done, you can swipe everything away, like Tony Stark in “Iron Man.”

Clay Risen

 5. Clean Hair, No Hands

This 15-minute shampoo treatment begins when you lean your head back into a machine that looks like a sink at the salon. First it maps your scalp, then it shoots streams of warm water and foam shampoo from its 28 nozzles before 24 silicone “fingers” work up a lather. One conditioning mist, scalp massage and light blow-dry later, you’re done.

Nathaniel Penn

 6. The Congestion Killer

Traffic jams can form out of the simplest things. One driver gets too close to another and has to brake, as does the driver behind, as does the driver behind him — pretty soon, the first driver has sent a stop-and-go shock wave down the highway. One driving-simulator study found that nearly half the time one vehicle passed another, the lead vehicle had a faster average speed. All this leads to highway turbulence, which is why many traffic modelers see adaptive cruise control (A.C.C.) — which automatically maintains a set distance behind a car and the vehicle in front of it — as the key to congestion relief. Simulations have found that if some 20 percent of vehicles on a highway were equipped with advanced A.C.C., certain jams could be avoided simply through harmonizing speeds and smoothing driver reactions. One study shows that even a highway that is running at peak capacity has only 4.5 percent of its surface area occupied. More sophisticated adaptive cruse control systems could presumably fit more cars on the road. Tom Vanderbilt

When a quarter of the vehicles on a simulated highway had A.C.C., cumulative travel time dropped by 37.5 percent.

In another simulation, giving at least a quarter of the cars A.C.C. cut traffic delays by up to 20 percent.

By 2017, an estimated 6.9 million cars each year will come with A.C.C.

Chris Nosenzo