- 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.,)
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.
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