Christophe Haubursin | Vox

What should an electric car sound like?

2024-07-03T14:35:22-04:00

For over a century, the internal combustion engine has powered vehicles with an intricate combination of moving parts and tiny explosions. That combustion process inevitably made noise, and that noise came to define the background soundscape of our roads, cities, and day-to-day life. But as hybrids and EVs have become increasingly mainstream — and more of their near-silent electric motors filled the streets — it’s clear that silent vehicles don’t fit in the ecosystem we’d built around cars.

After efforts spearheaded by associations of the blind and visually impaired, legislation eventually began to require electric vehicles to emit an artificial engine noise from hidden external speakers. These hidden speaker systems, called “Acoustic Vehicle Alerting Systems” — or AVAS — had to meet certain sonic criteria. But they were also a blank slate for sound designers to decide how the cars of the future should sound.

Why does this forest look like a fingerprint?

2024-05-09T11:10:17-04:00

Deep in the geographic center of Uruguay, there’s a peculiar group of trees just a few kilometers down the road from the small town of San Gregorio de Polanco. From the ground, it looks like any other forest, with tall trees reaching deep as far as the eyes can see. But from above, the view is mind-boggling: Hundreds of trees are arranged in perfect concentric arcs, all spiraling toward the center. Together, they look remarkably like a human fingerprint.

When we first saw this forest, thanks to a Reddit post, we were fascinated. Why had they been arranged in this shape? Who planted them there? And why — when you zoom out on satellite view — was the entire country of Uruguay covered in similar-looking forests? To answer that question, we went straight to the source: interviewing locals, experts, and people whose lives have been shaped by a transformed landscape and economy.

We’re already using AI more than we realize

2024-02-28T11:54:51-05:00

We’re living through an inflection point for artificial intelligence: From generated images and video to advanced personal assistants, a new frontier of technologies promises to fundamentally change how we live, work, and play.

And yet for all the buzz and concerns about how AI will change the world, in many ways, it already has.

From spam filters and sentence suggestions in our email inboxes to voice assistants and fitness tracking built into our phones, countless machine learning tools have quietly weaved their way into our everyday lives. But when we’re surveyed about which everyday technologies use artificial intelligence and which don’t, we aren’t particularly good at knowing the difference. Does that matter?

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This video is sponsored by Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365. Microsoft has no editorial influence on our videos, but their support makes videos like this possible.

What’s inside this crater in Madagascar?

2023-12-05T17:21:28-05:00

Right in the center of the island nation of Madagascar there’s a strange, almost perfectly circular geological structure. It covers a bigger area than the city of Paris — and at first glance, it looks completely empty. But right in the center of that structure, there’s a single, isolated village: a few dozen houses, some fields of crops, and dirt roads stretching out in every direction.

When we first saw this village on Google Earth, its extreme remoteness fascinated us. Was the village full of people? How did they wind up there? And what did life look like in such a place? To find out, we teamed up with a local crew in Madagascar and fell down a rabbit hole of geology and mapping along the way. It’s a story of how continental shifts and volcanic geology came together to form a place for a group of people to call home.

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How cruise ships got so big

2023-08-01T13:34:17-04:00

Cruise ships are freaking big. They’re the biggest passenger vessels humans have ever built. In size and appearance, they look nothing like almost any other boat. So how did they get that way?

The predecessor of today’s cruise ships was the ocean liner: big, beautiful ships that sailed across the Atlantic. But ocean liners had a totally different purpose from cruise ships: They were for transportation. Everything about them was designed to facilitate an ocean voyage from one continent to another.

But air travel changed that. Planes eliminated the main reason to take a ship somewhere, and the ocean liner business plummeted. So the industry pivoted and began selling the ship as the destination itself. The cruise ship was born. But the ocean liners, built for a voyage, weren’t ideal for the purposes of a cruise, and over the next few decades, the cruise ship began its evolution. And it has culminated in the behemoths we see today.

This is our fourth of five videos on design trends and systems in travel! Check out last week’s episode on why Americans love big cars.

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Why so many people need glasses now

2023-03-07T16:19:12-05:00

Over the past few decades, children around the world have been diagnosed with nearsightedness at increasingly high rates. Nearsightedness, or myopia, can stabilize over time, but it doesn’t get better — meaning that those with myopia will rely on glasses, contact lenses, or corrective surgery to see for their entire lives.

The blurriness associated with myopia is caused by eyeballs that have grown too long; in a stretched-out shape, eyes aren’t able to properly focus images onto the retina. Researchers believe two culprits are to blame: the lack of outdoor play, and prolonged time doing up-close activities like using digital devices.

In some places — like Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea, where over 80 percent of students graduating high school are myopic — intervening to slow the progression of myopia has become a nationwide effort.

Check out more of our body-related content, like this video on the special fat that kids have more of that makes them less cold in the winter.

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How trail designers build good hikes

2022-10-07T13:15:07-04:00

Designing a hiking trail seems simple enough: It has to take a person from point A to point B, pass through scenic nature, and last through years of wear and tear. And for most of human history, trails did that without much intentional design at all.

But as trails shifted from essential transportation to a recreational destination, the way we make them did, too. Now, hidden in every trail is a carefully made design language of angles, alignment, and materials that keep them enjoyable for generations.

Watch our video to hear trail ecologist Jeffrey Marion explain how these principles work — and why they’re more important than ever.

You can find this video and others like it on Vox’s YouTube channel.

This video is part of By Design, our series about the intersection of design and technology. For more videos like this, from playgrounds to font decisions, check out the playlist on YouTube.

How “dementia villages” work

2022-08-18T15:17:19-04:00

On any given day at the Hogeweyk, you can see locals wandering the streets, going out for coffee, folding laundry, and tending gardens, all surrounded by lush outdoor space. Located in Weesp, a Dutch city just outside Amsterdam, the Hogeweyk is a planned village intentionally designed for one purpose: maximizing quality of life for its 180 residents, all of whom have severe dementia.

Inside, nurses and doctors don’t wear uniforms, meals are cooked inside the home with groceries from the village store, and other Weesp residents are free to dine at the on-site restaurant. These design choices aim to deinstitutionalize senior living, blurring the lines between what typically happens in front of residents and what happens out of sight.

The style of care this facility pioneered has been nicknamed the “dementia village,” and it has been emulated across the world. It’s architecturally organized around choice: By giving residents a high level of freedom, its designers hope to minimize issues associated with dementia like aggression, confusion, and wandering.

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Who made these circles in the Sahara?

2022-05-10T11:27:10-04:00

Deep in the Sahara, far from any towns, roads, or other signs of life, is a row of markings in the sand. There are dozens of them stretching for miles in a straight line in central Algeria, each consisting of a central point surrounded by a circle of 12 nodes, like numbers on a clock. And when we started making this video, no one seemed to know what they were.

We first saw the circles back in September 2021, after finding a Reddit post on r/WhatIsThis with coordinates asking what the circles could be. With just two upvotes and two commenters, it wasn’t exactly a lively discussion. But seeing the circles themselves on Google Earth was fascinating: They were eerily perfect in their shape and regularity, but so deeply isolated in the desert. We were hooked on finding an answer.

So we decided to make a video out of trying to solve the mystery, no matter where it took us. We documented every step of the process — from Zoom calls and web browser screen recordings to vlogs and field shoots — to show the reporting process from the inside out. We talked to historians, geographers, and professors. And when we maxed out what we could learn on the internet, we handed over this story to a team in Algeria to take it all the way.

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Volodymyr Zelenskyy, explained in 8 moments

2022-03-09T14:28:10-05:00

Once known for his political comedy sketches and skits in which he pretended to play the piano with his penis, Volodymyr Zelenskyy was elected as the president of Ukraine in 2019 in a landslide victory.

Although he promised that his presidency would be different from other Ukrainian leaders who “promise a lot” yet “do nothing,” President Zelenskyy would soon find himself unpopular with the public. Within two years, he had already navigated scandals like his offshore companies appearing in the Pandora Papers and struggled to fulfill his campaign pledge to end the war against Russia in the Donbas region of Ukraine.

But the Russian invasion on February 24, 2022, found him extremely well positioned to offer his skills in performance and storytelling to motivate Ukrainians, rally Europe, and undermine Putin’s propaganda. How will his reaction to Russia’s advances affect his legacy?

We chose eight clips that we feel explain President Zelenskyy’s rise from a comedian to the leader of Ukraine and had journalists and experts respond.