Most of us love the feeling of weightlessness that accompanies a trip into the underwater world; now, a French designer has come up with a new wetsuit design that will further enhance feelings of freedom divers experience while exploring their favorite dive sites. While the new wetsuit design isn’t being marketed to the public yet, it certainly looks like a product many divers would enjoy using.
The Ocean Wings Wetsuit
Perhaps you’ve watched skydivers flying freely through the earth’s atmosphere with the help of special wingsuits, and maybe you’ve wondered what it would be like to experience that sensation for yourself – perhaps underwater. French designer Guillaume Binard must certainly have been curious about what it would be like to fly along underwater like a manta ray; he believed in his design enough to partner with AquaLung to create a wetsuit that is inspired by skydiving wingsuit construction.
The Ocean Wings wetsuit is designed to enable the diver wearing it to have what essentially amounts to an underwater flight experience. In demonstrations, the wearer is able to swim very much like a fish, thanks to large flaps that connect the underarms to the body of the suit in a webbed design that’s reminiscent of a manta ray or maybe even a flying squirrel’s body shape. The lower portion of the Ocean Wings wetsuit is designed to keep the diver’s legs close together, which helps to stabilize the diver as he or she moves through the water column. This extra stabilization helps to maximize the gliding motion and contributes greatly to the sensation of flight.
This design makes sense, particularly when you compare the human anatomy, which is clearly designed for walking about upright, on land, with the anatomy of underwater creatures, many of which have the ability to constrict their bodies for crawling along rocks and hiding in tight spaces, then expanding special membranes to take advantage of the natural buoyant forces the water column exerts. Without tails or fins, or flattened bodies designed to slice through the water, it’s pretty difficult for humans to move quickly – never mind glide gracefully along like sea creatures do. But with the help of neoprene membranes that capture the power of the water’s slightest motion, the human form gains new agility and grace.
While you might think the Ocean Wings wetsuit would make for some fairly out of control feelings and increase speed dramatically, the wearer instead experiences a fairly slow if free-feeling drift. In silhouette, the human form is suddenly metamorphosed into something much more aquatic in appearance.
Here, you can see the Ocean Wings wetsuit design in action. Modeled by free diver Pierre Frolla, the suit transforms the act of diving into something entirely different; a beautiful underwater ballet in which Frolla appears to exert no effort whatsoever while gliding gracefully through a series of massive boulders.
AquaLung has not released plans to offer the Ocean Wings wetsuit for sale, but we get the feeling that this suit would be fun for free divers to wear.