NANO Supermarket: 50 products from the future

The NANO Supermarket presents speculative products that may hit the shelves in the next ten years. Innovative and beautiful, uncanny and disturbing, but always specifically designed to provoke discussion, the products provide us with thought-provoking scenarios that help us decide what future we actually want.

Since its opening, the NANO Supermarket has received over 75,000 visitors in various cities including Eindhoven, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Pamplona, Milan and Stavanger. Check here for tour details or information about hosting the NANO Supermarket at your event.

We increasingly use digital technology to augment our senses, but we rarely realize that some of them are excluded from the process. Smell is a good example of a powerful sense that is hardly articulated in our technological culture, not anymore with Sniffer! Wear the Google Nose and amplify your sense of smell. What is that appetizing smell? Just ask Sniffer! Visualize scent in a Google glass style, thanks to a smell sensor, which is as good as a dog’s nose, and a small screen in front of your eyes. You can identify the faintest fragrances and see the source of the odor on a distance.

Enabling technology: Nanosensors

With Energy Belt, stop treating your excess fat like a liability, and instead embrace its untapped potential. Artificial protocells in the belt mimic natural brown fat, taking the energy from white fat and converting it into ATP. This chemical energy can be used to power everything from cell phones to pacemakers. Eat what you want at dinner, and give up that gym membership for good. Energy Belt cuts down on electricity costs while you cut down on size.

Enabling technology: Nano Transporters

Although smart medicines are able to execute various tasks in your body, they often still require human guidance. The Healing Game allows patients to steer their medication by playing a videogame. The game starts with the intake of an intelligent pill full of nano capsules and a substance that makes cancercells glow. Control the capsule and go on a seek and destroy mission inside your own body. You can even invite your friends and family to help. While gaming is often considered unhealthy, the Healing Game keeps you healthy!

People are increasingly aware of environmental issues but often do not know how they can make better choices. The Latro Lamp makes the better choice easy. The Latro is unique, attractive and friendly to the environment, all at the same time! The Latro uses energy-generating algae that are confined in a unique glass container. Odorless, easy and environmentally friendly. All you need to do is hang the lamp in a sunny spot so that the algae can collect energy. Blow in the bulb once a month to provide the algae with CO2, and refill with water every six months. After dark, the lamp will automatically light up. Be the first to have a living lamp in the house!

Enabling technology: Genetic Engineering, Nanocircuits, Nanoelectromechanical System

Our lustrous brochure attracts the attention of a broad and large audience and is distributed everywhere the NANO Supermarket travels. While reading the brochure it becomes clear that the NANO Supermarkt is not about selling stuff, but rather about a discussion on the impact of technology on our everyday lives.

The NANO Supermarket book presents 50 nanotech products that do not exist yet. But may be on the market within 10-20 years: medicinal candy, programmable wine, interactive wall paint, or an energy belt that charges your mobile devices from your own belly fat. The products are innovative and useful as well as strange or uncanny. They are not meant to predict the future, but to propose scenarios that help us decide what future we want.

Nanotechnology is an emerging field of science that deals with the manipulation of structures on an atomic and molecular scale. It is often seen as a trend in material science, but has much deeper implications. Nanotechnology is an umbrella term for various techniques that scientists use to operate on the very small nanoscale, ranging from nanostructures, nanocoatings, nano-encapsulation, nanocircuits, nanosensors, nanoparticles and more. Existing applications range from sunscreen and mobile phones to airplanes and medicines.

Nanotechnology radically intervenes with our notion of what is natural, yet there is only little discussion on how this emerging technology will change our everyday lives. It may realize the dreams people have of themselves and significantly improve our lives, but may also have its downsides. Hence the urgency to have a public debate on the impact of nanotechnology on our lives.