No, we are not talking about those water propelled suits. A british startup, Gravity, has just unveiled a jet engine propelled suit that can actually fly. The suit uses 6 miniaturized propulsion engines affixed on hands and legs of a wearer (yes, just like the iron man suit).
The inspiration behind the suit is obviously Iron Man that’s why they even named it Mark 1. But, the difference is that Iron man isn’t real while Gravity’s Mark 1 is. Built in just one year, Gravity has taken Iron Man suit pretty serious.
“Our vision is to build an entirely new generation of human flight systems for commercial, military and entertainment applications.” – Richard Browning, founder, Gravity
Their video of test practices showing how they improved the flight over the time gained quite an attention on Hacker News before disappearing.
Here are few screenshots from a brief article that Venturebeat covered –
Our friends at Venture Beats reached out to Richard Browning himself for his words about the suit –
“The suit has enough power to achieve many hundred of miles per hour,” he said in an email. “But safety is the first priority. We have developed the suit to be reliable, stable and highly capable at low altitude, running pace speed, and able to execute precise maneuvers. However, we are rapidly developing every aspect of the system toward some extraordinary, audacious goals.”
The suit also incorporates headup glasses to keep a tap on fuel and other information in real time..
The test video released by the company was shortly removed from Youtube, reasons of which are currently unknown. Another concerning thing is that the company’s official website is also locked now. Here’s a link to Google’s cache for their official website – http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:e_GYeUoUAvIJ:gravity.co/+&cd=5&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=in
The reason could be that company might have rushed the public disclosure and now want to keep things just to them only for a while. Let’s wait to see what they actually bring when they finally release it again.
You know that Gravity is not the only company going crazy over movie technology. Intel is on the same page. We found their patent on a real life magic wand just like the one you saw in Harry Potter. Read more about it here.