- Thomas Winship
New diving helmet seeks to revolutionize scuba diving
Scuba diving is an equipment-heavy activity. In fact, ‘equipment-heavy’ doesn’t even do it justice, scuba diving is equipment-dependent.
As in, without fairly large amounts of equipment, it is simply not possible to dive. And by and large, the equipment we use today, is the same as was used in the early years of the sport.
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Scuba diving gear hasn’t changed much, in its basic form, since Jacques-Yves Cousteau invented the Aqua Lung in the 1940’s.
There have been updates since, sure, with the equipment becoming more streamlined and sophisticated, the invention of rebreathers and sidemount, but nothing that really matches the breakthrough that the original Aqua Lung constituted; a large object strapped to the torso (often the back), hoses feed breathing gas to the diver, who inhales it through a mouthpiece.
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Nope, this is not from a movie
A new conceptual design, created by Thomas Winship, seeks to be exactly that breakthrough.
Named the ORB Helmet, it looks like a design out of the upcoming Star Wars movie, but it is in fact a helmet-mounted rebreather, that seeks to revolutionize scuba diving.
- Credit: Thomas Winship
It will essentially compress the tanks/rebreather unit on the divers back, the hoses, the mouthpiece, and even the dive mask into a single, self-contained unit. Strap on the helmet, and you’re ready to jump into the water.
New design might make diving easier for the ears
Adding to this is the fact that the helmet covers the entire head of the diver, much like a motorcycle helmet, also covering the ears.
As the helmet is pressure-resistant, that means that there is no pressurization of the ears, and with that, no need to equalize as we descend, and reduced risk of barotrauma to the sensitive parts of the inner ear.
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Communicating underwater with bluetooth
Using Bluetooth technology, the helmet would allow scuba divers to communicate with each other (provided they are within close proximity), and two helmet-mounted LED lights would give the diver light during night diving, cave diving, or wreck dives, without occupying his or her hands.
- Credit: Thomas Winship
So is this really new in diving?
However, the product is as stated only in its conceptual phase. And at this point, there are several unanswered questions (yes, this is the killjoy portion of the article).
First of all, modern-day rebreather technology is not at the level yet where a full-fledged rebreather can be squeezed into a unit of this size, at least not for dives of any extended duration or depth. Second, the limited information on the product’s Behance page calls it an “O2 Rebreather Helmet” (using O2 as the O in ‘ORB’). That would seem it is intended as an oxygen rebreather, which is a subset of rebreathers intended for extended, but very shallow dives, typically only up to 15 feet, as the pure O2 used in the system becomes toxic beyond this depth.
Oxygen rebreathers are largely used by military and commercial divers. It is not far-fetched to imagine these groups of divers be interested in a helmet such as this one, but it would place it outside the useful range of recreational divers.
Two technical scuba divers using closed-circuit rebreathers - Credit: Rich Carey
On the more detail-oriented side of things, Bluetooth communication is a good idea, but most products using Bluetooth have extremely short effective ranges. Bluetooth generally has a range of 30 to 40 feet through air, but as water is many times more dense than air, the range is severely reduced. It might be that divers would need to be within a few feet of each other to make the Bluetooth link work.
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And the LED lights are an interesting feature, but head mounted dive lights have been seen before, and are largely not used by recreational divers, as you risk temporarily blinding your dive buddy every time you look at them.
So the concept has a few kinks to work out, but more importantly, is limited by today’s technology. However, if they do manage to create a working version of this, look for me at the front of the line to test it out.
Would you take this new diving helmet for a dive? Given that it would work?
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Even tho one of my main goals almost every time I go diving is to get to my max depth (51 feet at lake Tahoe), I would love to give this ORB helmet a few chances under a variety of conditions (fresh, salt, river, flooded quarry, etc.) to better round out my understanding of and to acquaint myself with this new device. This helmet has anorher enticing aspect for me. I need prescription glasses to see 20/20 and I can’t use contact lenses. That helmet looks like it has plenty of room around the face for corrective lenses.
This helmet will kill you if you go diving with it. The person who came up with this concept has no clue at all about scuba diving and how rebreathers work/why they are big.
No need to equalise ears because they are in air inside the helmet??!! Come on, this is a scuba site, you can do better than that. Revise your OW physics.
is it a pressurized helmet ? You don’t have to blow your ears out inside a pressurized helmet (or a submarine, etc.,)
Yes you do in every environment where thee pressure is changing (like in a deco chamber). Submarines are NOT pressurized.
And if the helmet is NOT pressurized and your body is, there will be a tendency to push the body INTO the helmet (things like that already happened). So, no way. Basics of physics.
If the helmet is at 1 ATM and the rest of your body is at 4 ATM you are going to have close to 50 pounds on every square inch of your body trying to force it into that helmet. Old school copper hatted surface supplied divers called this a “squeeze.” Anyone who dove in this helmet would have to be rinsed out of it when they were pulled up.
There is no reason you couldn’t make a compact rebreather that fits in a helmet, but it would be a crude device limited to shallow depths and for incredibly short durations. Vintage submarine escape apparatus comes to mind. Unfortunately, there is no buoyancy control whatsoever.
In short, this idea is dangerous garbage, and you should be somewhat ashamed of falling for it.
Yawn. Another ‘design’ by an industrial ‘designer’, in other words somebody with a box of pencils and who wears a turleneck. We see this in the car industry all the time.
Until something has been designed by an engineer and commissioned in service it has not been designed. Don’t waste my time with this rot.
This seems to like the last invention, a pair of bicycle handlebar grips with a snorkel mouth piece in between ripping off people for investment.
I agree with A .Lwin. and R J. At their best we’ve already seen people killed using rebreathers; so how is this all going to work ?
With open circuit you know you have gas in your cylinder and a gauge that will tell you Time to head for the surface !
I seem to remember someone tried to market a pair of cycle handlebar rubber grips with a mouthpiece in between was a compact new breathing scuba invention. They were looking to rip investors off with a video clip of it. Is this a similar one ?
Why wouldn’t you want a shallow water rebreather? Good for shallow water like river’s and ya I get it probably not good for much else but better then pumping up a small dive tank for 5 to 10 minutes and for people like myself that can’t equalize pressure due to a ruptured eardrum or other complications.
I’m an advanced scuba diver with 71 dives. I know that’s not even close to most master (and up) divers, but it’ll sure beat snorkeling anytime, and that’s big time in my book. Imagine that, just swimming around on the surface while taking a plunge of 10 to 15 feet (if needed) to look at something closer. This would really revolutionize how we swim recreationally.
And you are an Advanced diver, still questioning barotraumatics and the range of problems connected with breathing pure oxygen? And you want all that from a volume that has no space for anything in the range of requirements set by pure physics? This thing will not work anytime soon, but people will go on paying as long as they won’t bother to learn. And I have hundreds of hours underwater to guarantee this… 😉
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My biggest fear would be how to get it off quickly when, not if, it fails. I
This could kill you in so many ways . BSAC trained diver
You could wear a neck dam. Someone came to my school to talk about underwater welding, and he said if one air line fails, he is supposed to cut the backup line and let the air flow under the neck dam.
I cannot get my ears wet, does this equipment guarantees that?
Thanks
No, it’s not working. Sorry.
Sure does, as long as you don”t take it underwater!
Also because it can’t possibly work. The Laws of Physics are all against the very concept, not to mention other things related to human metabolism etc.
The whole idea is based on optimism alone, and as a diver with 50+ years of experience, optmism in this field is both dangerous, and not enough.
As someone who works on cleaning and maintaining swimming pools with depths no greater than ten feet. I would like to try this to see if it would help staying under to clean algae and other debris (rocks, money, jewelry) from the sides and bottom.
There are so many “diving devices” obviously designed by non-divers which didn’t find it in them to refresh their basic laws of physcis, let alone barotraumatology. On another site I found a mouthpiece with two lateral thingies that appear as motorcycle handlebars. This thing was supposed to extract free Oxygen from the water for breathing. Aside from the fact that there is only about 2% of free O2, someone forgot that we do not breathe pure O2, and that the volume of water large enough to contain sufficient oxygen is simply huge. Etcetera.
Now this device is supposed to be a rebreather, but has no total volume for spare inert gas(es), nor the purification chemicals. If that isn’t funny enough, the helmet is at surface pressure, while the rest of the human pneumatic systems are exposed to the ambient…
OK, we can dismiss THIS kind of educational lack (and incentive), but reality has it that there are also thingies like SCORKL, actually a SpareAir knockoff which is even more dangerous because it is REAL and it is out there… Well, not quite, since there are all sorts of legal and financial problems around it making it all very scam-like. But the uneducated majority will buy a Spare Air and without proper education probably damage their health, because such devices are described as easy to use as a snorkel… What can we do against that kind of mercantilistic behavior?
There is much more… some are selling the swimming goggles as “diving” goggles, others are selling ear plugs for diving… ?
i was a diver for state of ill.scuba resq.and recovery team for 20 years plus water resq. for hernando county fire dept.20 years fl.i can see the posabiltes in rescu.work if it works???? i would try this out .
Let the buyer beware. notably pure oxygen rebreathers nearly killed the great Cousteau in the early days due to unexpected convulsions. This is vividly described in the opening pages of “The Silent World” (pp 16-17): “…my lips began to tremble uncontrollably. My eyelids fluttered. My spine bent backwards like a bow”….and then he…”lost consciousness.” He went on to say: “I had pains in my back and muscles for weeks.” Luckily in both tests using oxygen he managed to drop his weight belt at the last minute and was rescued by tenders.
Those chilling episodes that nearly killed the great Cousteau should tell you something. For Cousteau it led directly to rejecting use of pure oxygen and to his joint effort in developing working open circuit air breathing scuba still popular today.
On the other hand, modern rebreathers–casually referenced in the blurb above–are a completely different animal that typically does not use pure oxygen but mixes it in with inert gas at levels sufficient to sustain life while avoiding dangerous convulsions. Such diving requires very extensive preparation, gear costing thousands, plus considerable knowledge and training and is not a viable option for beginning divers.
Even ordinary scuba, while a safe sport, requires knowledge, training and experience. Without proper training you can easily injure yourself seriously or die–even breathing ordinary air at shallow depths–due to barotrauma or even simple drowning.
1. The idea that ears would not have to be equalized was arrived at, like this whole concept, by someone who has never done any diving and certainly no rebreather diving. To keep the pressure at 1 atm inside the helmet would require a pressure resistant seal around the neck. Good luck with that. I suggest using a guillotine arrangement. Idiots.
2. The simplest rebreathers require 4 major components to work:
a. Breathing gas
b. CO2 scrubber
c. regulator
d. counterlung
The amount of breathing gas required for an O2 rebreather is based on biological requirements. Technology cannot reduce it. It could be estimated at about 1 liter per minute doing moderately strenuous activity. So to get a 1 hr dive time you need 60 liters. A 200 bar tank then would need a minimum capacity of 0.3 liters (note the smallest rebreather tank in use is 1 liter but we’re talking minimal usefulness so 0.3 liter).
For this same 1 hr duration you need 1 kg of scrubber.
The counterlung determines the size of breath one can take. BARE minimum 4.5 liter, 5.5 liter if you want it approved by CE.
So we’re talking 7 or 8 liters of materials plus the containers (tank, shell, scrubber canister) plus you have to get gas from one to the other…
In short this concept is beyond ridiculous.
I have known and dived with persons accredited with many inventions from aqualung and compressed air speargun so am open to progress[still dive about 50dives a year].
This one on so many levels should not be anywhere near anything but very restricted tech manuals as it is dangerous.
With reading this article I started thinking of ways to do it and what to use before common sense prevailed there are many people out there who will play with this idea without dive experience[against theory/]and die.[the orgional brother of compressed air speargun died this way.
My advice[which will not be listened to[let military do it then use recreationally
As a commercial diver I have played with numerous helmets including a mark 4 and the ultralite…. which weighed 45 lbs but would work on scuba.
I saw the benefits of a helmet and the problems. About 40 years ago I built a scuba helmet which was very satisfying but the possible liability issues convinced me to park it. Technologies have changed and I am revising my design and building a prototype for testing. Rebreather… forget it but a scuba helmet is possible.