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Vertiwalk Vertical Walking

vertiwalk.com

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Re: Vertiwalk Vertical Walking

#11

Post by wolverine876 »

It's of those technologies so obvious, I don't understand why it's new. Often that signals genius or my ignorance:

Why now? Often the answer is, another tech's development enabled this one. Is that the case? They say here only:

> Vertical Walking is a new system to move yourself between floors in a building. By exploiting the potential of the human body and materials, only a fraction of effort is required, compared to taking stairs. No external energy is needed.

Maybe they use a capacitor? When going down, brakes store energy that supplements muscle power when going up? If that's the design, why not do it 20 or 40 years ago?

Perhaps it replaces stairs in constrained footprints, like dense urban housing, where stairs consume high proportions of space.

Re: Vertiwalk Vertical Walking

#12

Post by qbasic_forever »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #6
joel_dice wrote: post #2

This resembles ascending a rope using prusiks, which is a lot of fun if you haven't tried it. Great to see a variation the helps people with limited mobility to get around unassisted.

Didn't know what prusiks were — had to look it up. The video for the Vertiwalk looks to me more like standing and sitting in order to ascend. In standing the seat climbs up a bit to follow your bum, when sitting the floor climbs up a bit to raise your legs into a seated position. Descending is a bit challenging for my brain to understand.

You do the same thing with prusiks to ascend a rope. Here's an example of a practical application, getting out a crevasse when climbing glaciers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=px_m3qzHYTA

In an alpine scenario you'd descend by rappelling. I doubt folks in a home want to setup a munter hitch or similar though. :)

Re: Vertiwalk Vertical Walking

#13

Post by judge2020 »

wolverine876 wrote: post #11

It's of those technologies so obvious, I don't understand why it's new. Often that signals genius or my ignorance: Why now? Often the answer is, another tech's development enabled this one. Is that the case? They say here only: > Vertical Walking is a new system to move yourself between floors in a building. By exploiting the potential of the human body and materials, only a fraction of effort is required, compared t…

Did you watch the video? I get it's annoying not being able to scrub, but (one minute into the video) you can see that it's a simple system.

Re: Vertiwalk Vertical Walking

#15

Post by copo233 »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #6
joel_dice wrote: post #2

This resembles ascending a rope using prusiks, which is a lot of fun if you haven't tried it. Great to see a variation the helps people with limited mobility to get around unassisted.

Didn't know what prusiks were — had to look it up. The video for the Vertiwalk looks to me more like standing and sitting in order to ascend. In standing the seat climbs up a bit to follow your bum, when sitting the floor climbs up a bit to raise your legs into a seated position. Descending is a bit challenging for my brain to understand.

There's also a mechanical version of a prusik called an "ascender." That's what I think this thing basically is.

Re: Vertiwalk Vertical Walking

#17

Post by teddyh »

This seems too unpowered to be the best option in places with reliable electric power, and for places without reliable electric power, this looks too complex to be reliably repaired without a service infrastructure. And if you have that, you probably have reliable electric power. In short, it looks like a solution looking for a problem.

Re: Vertiwalk Vertical Walking

#18

Post by entropie »

teraflop wrote: post #5

In case anyone else was irritated by the inability to scrub through the auto-playing video, adding this CSS rule in your browser's dev tools should fix it: .vp-progress { display: block !important; }

Its so stupid to hide this and and inhibit people to understand what this is all about.

Re: Vertiwalk Vertical Walking

#19

Post by Zababa »

teddyh wrote: post #17

This seems too unpowered to be the best option in places with reliable electric power, and for places without reliable electric power, this looks too complex to be reliably repaired without a service infrastructure. And if you have that, you probably have reliable electric power. In short, it looks like a solution looking for a problem.

If it's cheaper than the other alternatives then it has a place.

Re: Vertiwalk Vertical Walking

#20

Post by Barrin92 »

teddyh wrote: post #17

This seems too unpowered to be the best option in places with reliable electric power, and for places without reliable electric power, this looks too complex to be reliably repaired without a service infrastructure. And if you have that, you probably have reliable electric power. In short, it looks like a solution looking for a problem.

as the website itself points out one of the explicit purposes is to keep people moving and exercising. Keeping people mobile (like the MS affected woman in the clip) is a great idea.

One of the worst things for people who are already impaired is to be overly sedentary because it accelerates function loss. It doesn't surprise me at all that this is coming out of the Netherlands by the way, a country that has a strong culture of keeping people healthy and active.

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