Camping has its own charm and it is often very exciting to carry your own tent and stay in completely natural surroundings. With the development of newer materials the tents have become lighter and much easier to carry but erecting a tent in somewhat adverse conditions can kill the romance of camping. On a dark night if it starts raining it feels like an impossible job to get the bent aluminum poles, strings and the sheets together. Two friends from Germany have worked on their idea for a better tent for almost eight years now and have finally launched it.
Their tent takes just a minute to erect. Developed by Stefan Clauss and Stefan Schulze Diekhoff, two friends from Hamburg, the design has two central concepts. The tent does not use poles but an inflatable skeleton and it uses a geodesic shape for the structure. It is the shape of a carbon molecule in its diamond form. These two concepts have come together very naturally to produce a very stable form. The elements that support the tent have been designed to be strong and have been constructed with dual layer.
The Stefans who first had this idea in 2003 while vacationing in Portugal were finally able to float their own company Heimplanet in 2008 and have now gone into production with a little help from a European development fund. Another highlight of the design is that the inflation process is one continuous operation but the inflated beams that take the weight of the structure have five separate sections so in case one or two sections fail to inflate the structure will still be viable and erect. The tent weighs 11.5 pounds which is equivalent to 5.2 kgs and has become available on the Heimplanet website for $669 or€499 plus shipping.
