Each week Nikolas Badminton, Futurist Speaker, summarizes the top-5 future looking developments and news items that I find to be inspiring, interesting, concerning, or downright strange. Each day he reads through dozens of blogs and news websites to find those things that we should be aware of.
In Future Trends: Disabled Drone Pilots we look at the trends that we should be aware of today, June 30th, 2016 (one day early this week due to Canada Day). How disabled people are learning to fly drones, re-purposing abandoned big box stores, hidden water in California, an intense laser bazooka, and using VR to experience blindness.

Training people with disabilities to become drone pilots

Drones are now so reasonably priced that they are available to most consumers who might want to buy or rent one. Now, HandiDrone is an initiative that enables those with mobility issues and disabilities to experience them too, while potentially setting them up to become drone pilots.
HandiDrone is a collaboration between the digital agency Kindai and LADAPT — the French association for social and professional involvement of people with disabilities. The aim of the program is twofold: to enable participants to experience the tranquility and control of being outside their own bodies through FPV flying, and to expose them to the emerging job of drone pilots, which could be compatible with their disability.
 

Via Springwise

Repurposing abandoned big-box stores.

Big-box stores promise convenience and jobs for suburbs and small towns, but have a mixed reputation with designers and citizens. Many see big boxes as icons of unsustainable sprawl, reinforcing car culture with highway-oriented access and expansive parking lots. These boxy buildings not only take up vast amounts of land but often also require infrastructure around them to be overhauled. Later, when their super-sized occupants leave: a giant empty structure is left in their wake, which can be difficult to reuse unless a similar retailer takes its place.

Some communities and architects, however, have started to turn these voids into opportunities, taking advantage of qualities unique to such megastructures. In one Texas town, a vacated Walmart has become thebiggest single-story public library in the United States.

Via 99percentinvisible

700 Trillion Gallons Of Water Found Deep Below California’s Central Valley

Stanford researchers have released a surprising new study revealing that California is sitting on top of a vast water resource that we didn’t know was there, and it could hold as much as 700 trillion gallons.
But, water experts say the problem with all that water may be getting to it.
“A lot of this new groundwater that researchers have found is pretty deep, and some of it’s salty, and it may be pretty hard to get to,” water expert, and President of the Pacific Institute Peter Gleick told KCBS.
Desalination of the resource would likely be cheaper than cleaning up ocean water, but aside from being deep down, the water is also far from urban areas.
Via CBS

Via Styropyro

Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness

Béatrice Lartigue provides insights on the work she did as an Art Director on this project that is an adaptation of the book Touching the Rock, the audio diary of John M. Hull discovering “a world beyond sight” published in 1990.
In April 2015, Arnaud Colinard/AGAT Films & Cie proposed her to work on an immersive 360° version of this story with him and Amaury La Burthe/AudioGaming. Here is the trailer:
https://vimeo.com/157679987
Read more at Medium

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Nikolas Badminton is a world-respected futurist speaker that researches, speaks, and writes about the future of work, how technology is affecting the workplace, how workers are adapting, the sharing economy, and how the world is evolving. He appears at conferences in Canada, USA, UK, and Europe. Email him to book him for your radio, TV show, or conference.