Local Motors, the open source, crowdsourcing auto manufacturer that promises to 3D print a car in the near future, has launched a new contest, in partnership with Boonar Studio, Pixologic, Auto®, and cardesign.ru. The Futu(R)Vision contest, in honor of the Auto® Automotive Design Conference in Zagreb, Croatia, seeks designs for the vehicle of the future. Only, in this contest’s vision of the future, things aren’t looking so bright.
Contestants: The year is 2214 and humans have retreated underground because toxicity levels on the surface of the Earth are unlivable for the next 18 months. The World Governing Federation needs your help! Your job is to model, in Zbrush, a vehicle for this dystopian future, an ROTUAV that can carry humanity below the Earth’s surface. A video vision of this future has been developed and you can check it out here — it has the quality of a good video game or blockbuster teaser. Local Motors, which has already used 3D printing to construct the door mounts for the side view mirrors on their crowd-sourced Rally Fighter and the Air Scoop for the Racer Motorcycle designed by André Costa, plans to 3D print the winning design and present them at the conference in Zagreb.
The Futu(r)Vision concept is a pretty interesting story to wrap around a design contest and definitely plays into the uniqueness of the Local Motors brand. It kind of reminds me of Philip K. Dick’s The Penultimate Truth in which, the majority of humanity is kept living underground in bunkers, while a war is fought on the Earth’s surface by the robots of the world’s two superpowers. Soon into the book, you discover that the war is actually a fabrication, sort of a giant Hollywood-esque production meant to keep the population underground building robots to serve the wealthy on the surface. There’s a whole class of wealthy advertising executives, called Yance-men, that live in huge mansions and produce newsreels with elaborate backdrops to convince the underground population not to come onto the lush green surface of the planet because the atmosphere is toxic and the war is raging. In that way, the Futu(R)Vision trailer is a bit of cultural production from our modern day Yance-men.
The thing is: I don’t want to live in a cyberpunk novel. As sci-fi predictions of the future more rapidly approach the present, the scarier and more complicated life becomes. So, before we find ourselves living in a world of hackers and totalitarian corporate governments fighting underground due to the extreme pollution that’s wrecked our ecosystem, I just want the world’s super rich to be nice and give the rest of the population the resources needed to survive and thrive, so that I can go live in a small, quiet house with my wife and our lizard, enjoying the fruits of nature and cold beers until we die.
Source: Local Motors
