Would you buy a hammock for your head?

By Trevor Mogg August 22, 2016

NodPod

Until some genius mind manages to nail teleportation, we’re just going to have to deal the best we can with the discomforts of long-distance travel.

Catching some z’s in a car or an airplane is for most people about as easy as catching a baseball with butter-slathered hands. It just ain’t gonna happen.

Aware that the main challenge with sleeping while sitting is getting comfortable, a Kentucky-based startup has designed the NodPod. Think of it as a hammock for your head.

This simple but possibly effective creation has already blasted through its $20,000 Kickstarter goal and at the time of writing has backing to the tune of $215,000.

Comprising a small slab of super-comfortable memory foam and a couple of strategically positioned cords, the NodPod keeps your head in position no matter what kind of seat you’re sitting in. “That way you won’t wake up with a kink in your neck, or with a bit of awkwardness from sleeping on the person seated next to you,” the company says in NodPod’s promo video.

Nodpod — Image used with permission by copyright holder

The simple-to-use NodPod works with all kinds of seats, including “plane seats, car seats, train seats, and even desk chairs,” though until you find a way of snoozing with your eyes open, it may be hard to convince your boss that you’re actually working and the NodPod is merely helping your “dodgy neck problem.”

The cords fit around the back of any seat, allowing you to position the NodPod comfortably around your chin. It may look a bit daft, but if it means arriving at your destination feeling refreshed, that daftness will be well worth it. Actually, you might want to sling on an eye-mask too in case some devious snapper grabs a shot and sticks it on social media.

Importantly, the NodPod’s cords have been designed in such a way so that on planes they won’t obstruct the seat-back screen behind, which is good because an angry passenger guarantees a sleepless journey for everyone close by.

The cheapest early-bird NodPods have already gone, but there are others available for $32 with an estimated delivery date of November 2016. You can find out more on the NodPod’s Kickstarter page here.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics

Contributing Editor

Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…

Computing

This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio

acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

News

Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards

Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

News

Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards

Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.