Diving Technology: Then, Now and in the Future

[danvolker]

I also remember using just the plastic backpak harness for my steel 72 tanks, with no BC into the mid 80's...the ONLY reason I added a BC in the mid-80's, was that most of the dive boats were getting pissy about having divers on the boat with no BC--apparently the ugliness of attorneys and liabilities was beginning to have an effect on boat policies--kind of the end of the time in America when we as a nation were ethical enough to take responsibility for ourselves--and not have to blame our own mishaps on someone else...

I hated the horse collars-=--would always refuse to wear them....I then hated the early stab jackets, but ended up forced to wear them if I wanted to go on a public charter..they were sloppy and high drag, and since I would normally dive in a lycra skin, I had no need of a BC.... The adage I learned in the 70's, was "Anyone that needs a BC deserves to drown"....and that was a perspective with some truth to it....it should not be a crutch that a diver "Needs" to be safe on a dive....at least not in warm tropical waters where you don't have to compensate for wetsuit bouyancy changes.

Around 1990, Frank Hammet got me an Atpac I used for several years, until it had the inflator hose break off at the place it goes into the wing, on a 145 foot deep dive I was heavily weight for ( due to huge current and desired fast drop)....this was a hard swim to the surface, and I liked the atpac system a lot less from then on The Stab jackets and weightbelt seemed the best compromise after the at pac....and the moment Robert Carmichael let me try the 18 pound lift Halcyon wing, with harness and back plate system--around 1997, I was DONE permanently with jacket bc's, and found the Halcyon to be "almost" as nice as the steel 72 in plastic backpac harness with no BC....which would still be desirable to me today far above any scubapro, mares, or any other jacket style BC.

The 72 was an awesome tank--the buoyancy was perfect for ocean diving...you just did not need the nonsense of a bc. I have no doubt, the dive industry decided they needed to abandon the 72's, so that tank swings would be much larger and would force divers to NEED a BC...that and the highly buoyant wet suits and all their swing with depth changes.

 

[elmer fudd]

I've done probably 50 dives here in Puget Sound without a BC and wearing either a 7mm or a 5mm wetsuit. The buoyancy swings exist, but even in a thick wetsuit they are manageable. Your weighting has to be pretty good, but what I found was that by far the biggest change in buoyancy is in the first 20'. If I weight myself so that I can become neutral at 20' with my lungs mostly empty, I can remain neutral down to about 60' by controlling my breathing. I found that even at 100' I was able to ascend by taking a very deep breath, but as soon as I released it I sank back down.

I did this with a pair of double 72's as well and the tank swing was more pronounced. When diving those I just planned on being a bit negative to begin with and on picking up a rock later on in the dive.

 

[PeterNBiddle]

Nice, carbon allotropes. The toxicity of the nanotubes may provide a problem with breathing air, but being 5 times(?) stronger than steel, you could sure punch up the pressure!

Wrap a thin titanium bottle with a nanotube lattice then cover that with a thin layer of UHMWPE for abrasion.

My paintball marker uses a 5K PSI carbon fiber bottle that is probably 1/5 the weight (perhaps less?) of an equivalent steel bottle. The weight difference helped spawn a revolution in paintball play.

 

[ajduplessis]

I'm not really sure that the alternative is all that safe either. Fact is we are completely out of our element at those depths and nothing short of a submarine is going to make them safe for us.

Please dont include me in your "we" statement, just becauce you are out your depth! I dive safe thank you.

Hey easy there! He was told it was safe when he got certified and that guys like me are crazy and don't know what danger we are in. He paid a lot for that cert don't disillusion him!

Glad to see your children made it to adulthood, I was worried there for a second.

Based on the lack of training, knowledge and diving experience from you gentlemen, I will elect not to wake you from your peaceful slumber.

 

[AfterDark]

Please dont include me in your "we" statement, just becauce you are out your depth! I dive safe thank you.

Glad to see your children made it to adulthood, I was worried there for a second.

Based on the lack of training, knowledge and diving experience from you gentlemen, I will elect not to wake you from your peaceful slumber.

Thankfully, there are guys like yourself with the money to spend to keep driving technology. If it was left to guys like me we'd still be using j valves. Thanks for worrying about my kids Lord knows I did enough of it myself, very nice of you.

 

[PeterNBiddle]

Super mask

Replace the inside of the lens with an ultra HD display, the outside with two massive (half a lens) sensors.

Run the camera feeds through a nice fast computer so that you can tweak all the color values dynamically to give the wearer full color values at every depth.

Add object recognition SW with links to cached Wikipedia and you can see what you're seeing.

Add thermal sensing.
Add mm wave radar or sonar.
Add IR.

With big/fast enough sensors, 3D object recognition & a library color palette you might get close to night vision without added light.

Add GPS, dead reckoning, terrain mapping and a pre-loaded crowd-sourced map of the dive site and you can superimpose older mappings on your own and continue to refine the details of online maps until you have immersive realism.

That also helps people know reef and fish health, etc., lots of big-data research potential.

Scuba Pet

An ROV robot you can control/drive via your mask but that will follow you and perform automated tasks dynamically (eg bring you air if your octo starts breathing, or whatever).

Follows you at 15 feet carrying spare air tanks, and tows a high-speed radio antenna via a buoy with sat or cell network connection.

Connect super-mask to the pet via laser or tether and use that to provide real-time HD diving experiences to people anywhere in the world, which can be fully immersive if they are wearing super masks.

Reef Guard Drones

Autonomous solar-powered robot buoys you put over protected reefs to protect them from fishing. Use them to harass (eg via torpedoes with nano-tube string they can spray into props) boats, cut nets and otherwise make fishing on a protected reef too expensive to bother with.

You can make them dormant until they hear prop wash and then crowd source or use dedicated operators to check to see if boats are fishing or sight-seeing or scuba diving before you let them deploy reef defenses.

 

[drrich2]

I think heads up display technology will advance for masks, such that the OceanicWorldwide type data mask with integrated dive computer will offer more info.; combine this with digital compass and Liquivision Lynx-style locator technology, and an arrow could pop up on your mask display, basically leading you 'by the nose' to a given bearing, diver or other destination. Like following the display on a modern GPS while driving.

At which point I expect a large number of repetitive threads of the 'tables vs. computers' ilk fussing about how so few new divers know how to use a compass anymore, or practice 'good' buddy skills.

Richard.

 

[elmer fudd]

Please dont include me in your "we" statement, just becauce you are out your depth! I dive safe thank you.

No. You don't. If you are technical diving you are engaged in an inherently dangerous activity, just like mountain climbing, skydiving or motorcycle racing. There's a good reason why life insurers don't like to cover these activities.

If you think you really are in your element down there, then just show me a video of you breathing underwater without any gear. We use tanks full of air and rebreathers precisely because we ARE out of our element underwater.

 

[CT-Rich]

Super mask

Replace the inside of the lens with an ultra HD display, the outside with two massive (half a lens) sensors.

Run the camera feeds through a nice fast computer so that you can tweak all the color values dynamically to give the wearer full color values at every depth.

Add object recognition SW with links to cached Wikipedia and you can see what you're seeing.

Add thermal sensing.
Add mm wave radar or sonar.
Add IR.

With big/fast enough sensors, 3D object recognition & a library color palette you might get close to night vision without added light.

Add GPS, dead reckoning, terrain mapping and a pre-loaded crowd-sourced map of the dive site and you can superimpose older mappings on your own and continue to refine the details of online maps until you have immersive realism.

That also helps people know reef and fish health, etc., lots of big-data research potential.

Scuba Pet

An ROV robot you can control/drive via your mask but that will follow you and perform automated tasks dynamically (eg bring you air if your octo starts breathing, or whatever).

Follows you at 15 feet carrying spare air tanks, and tows a high-speed radio antenna via a buoy with sat or cell network connection.

Connect super-mask to the pet via laser or tether and use that to provide real-time HD diving experiences to people anywhere in the world, which can be fully immersive if they are wearing super masks.

Reef Guard Drones

Autonomous solar-powered robot buoys you put over protected reefs to protect them from fishing. Use them to harass (eg via torpedoes with nano-tube string they can spray into props) boats, cut nets and otherwise make fishing on a protected reef too expensive to bother with.

You can make them dormant until they hear prop wash and then crowd source or use dedicated operators to check to see if boats are fishing or sight-seeing or scuba diving before you let them deploy reef defenses.

Are you talking about the I-gill?

 

[fdennis]

1982: I got my first OW cert thru YMCA, Shark Night and all. :cool2: I was a college student, which of course meant half my gear looked like it had been picked up used from a Salvation Army store (which wasn't too far from the truth). Basic gear was a tank harness, baseline BC (after horse collars but before power inflators), single second stage regulator, two-unit console with compass and SPG, lead brick weight belt, black rubber mask, straight tube snorkel, and most everyone was rocking the Rockets. And a watch. We worked our square profile dives on the tables, and we worked 'em hard.

Jacket-style BCDs with integrated weight systems were just starting to hit the market in a significant way, as were octopus regulators, but those were for rich people. J-valves were still around, but on the way out. The newest four-banger calculators were still the size of a paperback book, so affordable dive computers were still a distant dream.

Now: the biggest single innovation has been the dive computer, and the way it has freed divers from the constraint of the square dive profile. I do miss my Rockets, though, and I still wear a watch.

Future: Three things I'd most like to see:

1. Mask-integrated on-demand HUD display of dive computer and SPG info.
2. A polypro/hybrid environment suit which would fit and move like a Lycra skin, and provide below-freezing thermal protection. Frankly, I don't know why this one isn't around already; I have Patagonia capilene which has kept me comfortable in -20F temps (Anchorage in January), and that's the midweight stuff.
3. Forget both OC and CCRs; replace both with a molecular filter system which can extract breathable air directly from the surrounding water, and automatically mix it appropriately for depth. Now this one might be tricky....