io9: balloons

Alien Balloon Creatures Invade Miami Beach

Lauren Davis — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 07:40:00 PST

While the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade fills the skies with familiar cartoon characters, the Skywalkers parade took a very different tack, creating a procession of bizarre, alien ballon creatures.

In 2006, FriendsWithYou opened Miami's Art Basel show with Skywalkers. The premise of the piece was a procession of universal entities coming together to welcome the Earth into the universal community. For one day, 18 of these oddly shaped blimps hovered over Miami Beach.

Skywalkers [FriendsWithYou Studios via FFFFOUND!]

Festive Balloon Monsters for Your Next Alien Invasion

Lauren Davis — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 10:30:00 PDT

Jason Hackenwerth weaves elaborate and colorful alien creatures out of ordinary party balloons. They may not do well in a fight, but they'll add a festive tone to your next invasion.

Hackenwerth started working with party balloons as a street performer, and now creates these enormous sculptures, the largest of which stands at 40 feet. Each sculpture uses hundreds of balloons and takes several hours to make. As many people comment that the airy monsters resemble sea creatures, Hackenwerth frequently photographs them at the beach, although they occasionally invade the cities and forests as well.

Attack of the 50ft party balloon [Daily Mail via Make]

Power Your Home with Helium Balloons

Annalee Newitz — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 16:09:48 PDT

Need to get some quick-and-pretty solar energy to your house, but don't want to mount a bunch of heavy solar panels on your roof? Now you can start powering up with these gorgeous, lightweight solar balloons. As long as you've got a helium tank handy, says inventor Joseph Cory, just one or two of these balloons made with photovoltaic solar cells could power your whole house.

Cory developed the balloons with aerospace engineer Pini Gurfil. The two say that these balloons would be good for off-the-grid applications, like setting up a camp after a disaster or pumping energy into a house far from electricity generators. Because the balloons are so lightweight and energy-efficient, they can be quickly deployed and moved around.

According to Inhabitat:

Cory and Gurfil have constructed several prototypes and have conducted research to show that a 10 ft balloon could provide around a kilowatt of energy (equivalent to 25 square meters of solar panels). Their target cost is $4,000 per balloon, compared to the $10,000 it would cost for a solar field producing the same amount of energy. The balloons will last about a year without needing maintenance.

Not sure how they would fare in a storm, but perhaps you'd just have some capacitors charged up so you could take the balloons down during times of heavy rain.

Solar Balloons [Inhabitat]