Orange has unveiled a concept solar tent in conjunction with the opening of this year’s Glastonbury music festival in the U.K. The goal of Kaleidoscope, the design firm working with Orange, was to create a tent that would help participants of Glastonbury, the U.K.’s famous open-field music festival, which is sponsored in part by Orange, with their communication and power supply needs.
So inspired by the new flexible photovoltaics in development, the tent – if produced for consumers, would be covered in a semi-photovoltaic fabric woven with both coated solar threads and conventional threads to form a solar shell that could be adjusted to face optimum sun throughout the day. The solar energy would then be channelled into four main power uses: heating, lighting, communications, and recharging.
It would be fitted with “glo-cation†technology that will enable campers’ mobile phones to identify their tent using either an SMS message or automatic active RFID technology; both would trigger a distinctive glow in the tent helping identify it from a distance. At the heart of the Concept Tent is a wireless control hub displaying energy generated and consumed, and giving a wireless internet signal.
If that’s not enough, the concept also contains an internal heating element embedded in the groundsheet to keep campers warm at night. But unfortunately, it may take some time before the tent will be on sale as photovoltaic fabric has never been used actually.
