We do not know what the future actually holds for us. However, one thing that I am (almost) certain of is that all of our daily-use products will eventually become “smart”. Over the past couple of decades, we have seen numerous electronic gadgets like watches, vacuum cleaners, and refrigerators become smart. Now, a company has developed smart benches that can charge your smartphone wirelessly and even charge your e-bikes or scooters.
The Croatia-based startup, Include is a company that manufactures smart benches and smart waste bins. Previously, the company released a smart bench named “Steora”. Now, it recently unveiled three new versions of the Steora – Steora Classic, Steora City, and Steora Cyclo.
Steora Classic
Now, the Steora CLassic is a regular-looking bench but packs a lot of tech inside. It comes with two Qi-supported wireless charging areas to charge your smartphones and headphones wirelessly.
Apart from this, the Classic also packs seat-cooling technology, sensors to measure the temperature, humidity, and pressure in the environment, and ambient LED lights for aesthetics. And all these components are powered by integrated solar panels, although the smart bench can also run using the city’s powerlines.
Steora City
The Steora City is a more advanced version of the Classic and packs more tech aside from the aforementioned ones. So, apart from all the above features, the Steora City packs an LCD display along with an optional AI camera that can capture the environment around it and monitor citizens in the area.
The company claims that they do not store any of the videos. So, as per the company, the privacy of citizens is not being murdered by this bench.
Steora Cyclo
Finally, the Steora Cyclo is the most advanced version in this line as it serves as an entire service station for electric bikes and scooters.
This one is specifically made for e-bike commuters as it packs the necessary charging plugs and power to juice-up an electric bike or an electric scooter. It also features an air compressor and additional hand tools to service your e-bike.
So, these are the three smart benches that Include unveiled recently. All of these, according to the company, runs on a custom cloud-based operating system called Solos. This enables users to access the data collected by the benches and control some of the functionality of the benches remotely.
You can check out all three models of the Steora benches on Include’s official website.
