h a l f b a k e r y"Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
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Descending stairs in a zorb is widely know to exist, but the stairs tend to be outside, large, and done for sporting and recreational purposes.
Stairs in domestic dwellings tend to be comparatively narrow and steep, and used mostly for practical transportation purposes rather than sports.
The usual
way to use domestic staircases is by walking both on the ascending and descending legs of the journey. However this can be slow.
Proposed is a built in zorb-like system to permit more rapid descent.
How it works: There is a rail running down both sides of the staircase. During the ascending phase of the journey, the human can grasp one rail with each hand, and use them to assist their ascent.
When a user is preparing to descend, they stand at the top of the stairs. A pressure sensor or button or something actuates a high speed inflatable hemisphere which emerges from each rail at the top. The flat inner surfaces of each inflatable hemisphere are velcro-coated and have a vaguely human-shaped recess.
The two halves pop together around the person and the velcro attaches them together. Each half remains attached by the air / control line to the rail.
Now the user can leap down the stairs head over heels. The air/control lines slide down the rail with them.
When the user gets to the bottom, they come to a halt, hopefully the right way up. Another sensor in the floor or rail or something actuates a rapid deflation of the hemispheres. A clever little control interface thingy uncurls the velcro hooks allowing the two halves to fall away to either side. The rapidly deflating halves are sucked into little receptacles attached to the rails. They disappear into a space in the wall and are transported on a second concealed rail back to the top ready for re-use.
I imagine that 5 or 6 or more such capsules may be fitted to each side, running in a circuit down the handrail and back up the concealed track. That way multiple users could stand at the top of the stairs, be encased in a zorb, leap down, and walk away, without having to wait for the previous user to have cleared the bottom of the stairs.
There could be a manual over-ride switch to give users carrying trays of coffee or similar spillable or fragile or oversize items the option of walking down the stairs without actuating the automatic zorb-encasing machinery.
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Annotation:
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This has the advantages of being much more expensive and dangerous than an escalator, with the same extra space. One can anticipate many people lying at the bottom of stairs having been extracted upside down being squished by the following zorb. |
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Where this is needed is in big public spaces -
Grand Central Station, the Spanish Steps of Rome, the ziggurats of Mexico, to turn weary, trudging crowds into cascades of joyous human lottery balls. |
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This could also be used to revive ski resorts where all the ice has melted. |
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Yes, domestic. Because 1. you need the pair of close handrails to hold the attached sliding / supply retraction mechanism, and 2. because free zorbing down large staircases is already done as mentioned in idea, and suggesting that more people do it is "let's all". |
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The problem with home staircase Zorbing is the width. Your "normal" Zorb is about 3m diameter; too big for at-home use.
But your idea still puts a sphere around a standing human, so it will still require a staircase of ~1.8m wide (with a minimum of "padding"); far larger than the usual ~0.7m. A crouching human would be better, but more awkward. |
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I never said it had to be actually geometrically spherical, or gave engineering tolerance definitions for how out of truly round it would be. When I said "hemisphere" you all already knew (because of the pre-defined geometrical constraints of staircase width and human height) that this was a kind of colloguial shorthand for "hemi-oblate-spheroidal flattened along the x axis". Most of the bouncing happens in the y-z (saggital) plane, so the x thickness does not need to be so padded. The zorb will not spin in all directions because of the handrail attachment points. |
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If you prefer think of it as an inflatable wheel rather than a zorb. That's just a matter of semantical nit-pickling. |
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It's okay to admit you were thinking of it as a sphere. We'll judge you harshly, but you can live with being scorned for a few decades can't you? Sew a black patch on your arm if you must but I wouldn't even think about suicide. |
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I'm a mathematician. In my world, hemispheres are hemispherical.
But an inflatable wheel structure works, so carry on! |
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This is a bun for what [Voice] said. +( in first anno) |
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Explain what the difference is from a topological point of view. |
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Also, from a geometrical point of view, a staircase can usefully be defined using a different, distorted geometrical co-ordinate system quite independent from cartesian space. |
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