Philippe Starck once famously said that there should be no cars on the road—-only motorcycles. While some soccer moms may disagree, his theory is valid: less pollution, more space, and dare I say it—more badassery. With all the recent developments of augmented reality-based windshields seen in concept cars in the past few years, it was only a matter of time before a Google Glass-like HUD in a motorcycle helmet saw the light of day—and as sci-fi as it sounds, it’s real and it’s here.
This week’s Spotify-powered SolidSmack Radio Playlist brings an entirely new face-smack of great music to help propel you through those laborious, tedious design tasks for the next few days. This week we curated a list of some of Thom Yorke’s current favorites for when he’s not busy making his own music. We’ll start with some some upbeat sounds from Alex Cortex and work our way through some Actress, Aoki Takamasa, Tapes, and others before wrapping up with one of the latest tracks from The Knife.
Slipping a chunky headset on your noggin and diving into a digital reality was a wonderfully inviting development in years gone past. Virtual Reality (VR) was a technology that went the way of badly marketed viewing devices and gaming platforms that eventually turned into large mechanized boxes at malls and theme parks–boxes you and your friends could climb into and sit staring at a first-person roller coaster ‘experience’ on a big screen for five minutes. Fortunately, times have changes and VR is back with a VRengeance. The VR headset is just one device delighting the depths of our viewing experience, but simply standing or sitting in a 3D environment doesn’t quite do VR justice. The Omni by Virtuix changes that… big time. It’s the first VR interface that allows you to walk, run, duck and dodge in a natural way. The applications for gaming are obvious, but this interface also brings interesting new potential for how you experience product design.
It seems as though biomimicry has taken on new meanings as of late—between the recent MIT Silk Pavilion and now this Dewars marketing campaign, ‘natural fabricators’ have been getting just as much attention as the latest 3D printer Kickstarter campaign. To help generate hype for their new Highlander Honey whiskey release, Dewars is live-streaming the production of various sculptures created by their army of honey bees…effectively putting a whole new spin on the current popularity of the ‘Designer/Maker’ in major marketing campaigns.
It’s been exactly a week since the much-anticipated release of the Jony Ive-designed iOS 7 was revealed at Apple’s WWDC in San Francisco, and already there is a Tumblr parody on par with the popular Hipster Branding Tumblr. I vividly remember back in design school when fellow industrial design students ‘branded’ their projects with mixed results–which commonly led to group critique discussions centered around ‘industrial designers are not graphic designers’. Perhaps the goal of this humorous crowd-sourced blog is to reinstate that point—at Apple’s expense of course.