Abom Unfoggable Goggle

Client: Abominable

Abom Website

2015

  • Gold Medal, Edison Awards 2016
  • Best New Technology, SIA SnowShow 2015
  • Gear of the Show, Outside Magazine 2015
  • IDSA IDEA FINALIST 2015
  • Industrial Design
  • Naming
  • Engineering
  • Prototyping
  • Testing

Problem

The problem is simple. You're on the mountain and your head is pumping out heat while the outside of your goggle air is much cooler. The moist heated air within the goggle meets the cold lens and condenses, causing fog to happen.

Solution

In the Abom goggle, that warm air generated by your head is met with with a warmer environment due to the slightly heated lens. There is no condensation and therefore, no fogging!

No Fogging Way.

If you’re a skier or snowboarder you know how frustrating it is when everything is right but your goggles are fogged. It was this problem that client Dave McCullough expressed to his friends Howard Russell and Jack Cornelius. These two friends were sort of the dynamic duo of Patent Atty, Howard and Engineer, Jack. The two did some research and came up with a solution that could address this problem:  Heated ITO film. ITO is a transparent  conductive material that is sputtered onto a clear substrate. By applying a  a voltage across this film, the surface heats up and decimates the fog. Having a firm grasp on the physics of fog, Jack  correctly theorized we only needed  to get the temperature above dewpoint.

Jack built a quick proof of concept with a couple of large lithium ion batteries and a  piece of of ITO film. Next, Jack and Howard came to FUSE with the plan to build a ski goggle and challenge the industry. Long story short, FUSE did the industrial design, brought in the electrical engineer, built two generations of prototypes and completed the database for the final production version goggle. We also found the manufacturer and key suppliers and creatives along the way, named the colorways and even named the the company founded to deliver this new piece of equipment. Abom sold out of their first years production.

2012-05-01 10-42-16.411

 

 

 

 

First, we did our research. A couple of our team were active skiers so we had some idea of the market but we still did our research. We needed to know the psychographics of this user, survey the industry's current and historical product and understand the critical relationship between helmet and goggle. We bought alot of cool product. After creating accurate underlays using a NOCSAE head, the goggle electronics and potential user interface we started drawing... alot. Typical of FUSE, we create walls of drawings and then filter out the best, and always contextually testing our designs against the current market and the general zeitgeist. Of course we wanted new but we also know the snow industry lives within a visual code.

This is an example of the exploded view that accompanied our Bill Of Materials. We worked closely with first a local molder to help guide some of our geometry design and then with the manufacturer in Italy.

We built multiple in house prototypes on our 3D printer. These were not mountain ready but good enough to check fit of both internal components and we could check the fit against helmets.

Just after Jack's proof of concept we built what we called "Frankenstein", a wearable engineering mule of the functional anti fogging system. At this stage, our batteries were huge and needed to live in the straps. This is Howard, fog free at Mount Hood Meadows in Oregon.

Key to explaining how the product actually worked, Vince O'Malley, the electrical engineer and now CTO at ABOM built this fogging chamber to demonstrate how the goggle could prevent and decimate fogging. Here Vince is using one of the Frankensteins as a lab rat during the making of the Kickstarter video.

Higher quality rapid prototypes were built as patterns for functional prototypes to be made from cast urethane. This pattern doubled as a physical illustration to demonstrate the first build of the database on the way to the cast urethanes.

Here is one of the pre-production cast urethane goggles on boarder Temple Cummins. Photo by Trevor Graves.

FUSE provided all the drawings for the patents and for any communication images needed for inbox instructions. Here's an example of one of the plates for a sequence that explained the lens removal.