The Dyson Zone is a pair of headphones with an air purification system

Dyson is entering a new segment in the way they know best. The Dyson Zone is a pair of noise-cancelling headphones with built-in air purification, which courses through a magnetic face visor that kind of makes you look like a Mortal Kombat character. The headphones part is the newer segment that Dyson is entering, but let's dive into the air purifier aspect first. Dyson wants to make it easier to breathe in cleaner air, especially if you live in urban areas.

As The Verge pointed out, the Zone's air purification tech is basically a miniaturized version of the company's existing air filtration tech. It pulls in air through each earpiece using tiny compressors, which it then filters and pipes through that visor-like thing across the face. The visor isn't flush against your face. Instead, it sits a bit in front of it, so there's a gap where a bubble of clean air gathers, which is what you breathe in. When you need a face mask, an attachment works for this use case.

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O-Wind Turbine wins James Dyson Award

Two students from the Lancaster University in the UK discovered a way to harness urban wind by inventing a new type of wind turbine. And this project is what won Chilean Nicolas Orellana and Kenyan Yaseen Noorani this year’s James Dyson Award. The two students taking up International Innovation MSc together invented the O-Wind Turbine. Instead of capturing wind travelling in one direction—which traditional turbines do—their invention has a geometric shape capable of generating wind, no matter which way the wind is blowing. The O-Wind Turbine was inspired by the NASA Mars Tumbleweed Rover and features a 25cm sphere with geometric vents. It sits on a fixed axis but spins when wind hits it from any direction. Gears drive the generator and these convert the wind power into electricity. Orellana and Noorani take home $50,000 for their project and another $8,500 for their university department.

In a press release about the win, Sir James Dyson said, “Design something that solves a problem is an intentionally broad brief. It invites talented, young inventors to do more than just identify real problems. It empowers them to use their ingenuity to develop inventive solutions. O-Wind Turbine does exactly that. It takes the enormous challenge of producing renewable energy and using geometry, it can harness energy in places where we’ve scarcely been looking—cities. It’s an ingenious concept.”

James Dyson Award is now accepting entries

Dyson’s international design award, the James Dyson Award, is now accepting entries that will follow the brief “design something which solves a problem, big or small.” The winner of the competition doesn’t just gain international exposure but also $50,000 to develop the idea. Last year’s winner was a team from McMaster University who worked on a low-cost, early detection melanoma skin cancer device called The sKan. If you’re an young designer or engineer who’s still in school or just graduated and have an idea you want to pitch, you can read more about the contest after the jump.

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Dyson gets into electric car business

Heathcliff O’Malley

Dyson’s latest project might seem a bit outside its wheelhouse but when you think about it, the technology company has always been in the business of cleaning our air of pollutants. And so the company is turning its sights to electric vehicles as announced by James Dyson, the company’s founder and chief engineer. Dyson is set to unveil a battery-powered electric vehicle by the year 2020. It’s supposedly going to be a “radical and different” type of car.

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