Say you’re out and you’re cycling and you run out of water. This isn’t surprising since most bottles that fit onto bicycles are pretty small. This isn’t really a problem since you can always go to a store to buy a new bottle, or head home to refill it, but what if you’re miles from civilization? Austrian industrial designer Kristof Retezar might have a solution for you.
Retezar has created a bottle that can apparently convert the air around you into water. How it works is it condenses the humidity around you, which passes through the device and a series of hydrophobic “teeth”, which will then turn the water vapor into actual droplets of water which will then be collected as the bottle fills up.
Dubbed the Fontus, the device is said to be able to generate 0.5 quarts of water per hour. However the downside is that not only is it slow, but it seems to work best in humid environments anywhere between 86 degrees to 104 degrees Fahrenheit and between 80-90% humidity.
Right now the Fontus is still a prototype and there is still a lot of work to be done. For example while it can filter out bugs and dust, it is unable to filter out contaminants like sediment, something that Retezar hopes to rectify in the future with a carbon filter. The designer plans on launching a crowdfunding campaign in the near future to help make the Fontus a commercial reality.
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