This futuristic Volkswagen DJ-inspired car’s roof lets music lovers display their beats

We love concept designs here, in fact, Yanko Design started out with a passion for concepts! And concept cars always catch my attention because they give you a glimpse of the kind of future we always see in movies. Or even the Jetsons which was a futuristic cartoon (does anyone remember?) that showed compact flying cars and that’s what I first thought of when I saw IRIS, a conceptual Volkswagen electric car. It may not fly but it instantly tells you that it was made for a sustainable future.

The interesting thing about IRIS is that designer Arturo Tedeschi used tools like DJs do with instruments and samplers. “IRIS is the output of a cross over between algorithmic design, virtual reality, and videogames,” says Tedeschi. I can see the DJ aesthetic with the neon lights and it works – crank up the volume and you’ve got yourself a show on the road. The project beautifully merges unlimited potentials of algorithmic modeling to create freeform shapes rendered in real-time with realistic materials featuring the famous game-engine. “The light gradient is created by moving the hand controllers like a magic wand and the wheel rims are generated trough a vortex animation of fluid material,” says the team while explaining their design and development process.

This two-seater has been envisioned to be an electric car with a futuristic aesthetic that balances smooth curves and angular elements. You can truly see the designers’ process while they tried to put their thoughts on paper through hand-drawn sketches, reality control (MindeskVR), algorithmic modeling, and finally rendering – the team is not shy to show it all and inspire more designers to take things up a notch! IRIS was modeled to fit the Volkswagen range and the team had the honor of digitally presenting it to Volkswagen at the ‘Future Technology for Car Design’ event held this month.

Designers: Arturo Tedeschi and Maurizio Degni

This article was sent to us using the ‘Submit A Design’ feature.

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An aperture-inspired intricate circle master worth treasuring!

The aperture is perhaps one of the most beautiful parts of a camera to look at. It takes inspiration, of course, from the way the aperture of your eyes open and close to let more or less light in. That mechanism is a thing of sheer beauty, and with the Iris drawing tool, it finds itself in a new avatar. Meet Iris, a refreshingly different circle-maker that has me obsessing over geometric drawings all over again.

The Iris comes with a rotating ring and 20 individual aperture lids. Turn the outer ring and the lids move, causing the circular void in their center to expand or contract. Designed to make drawing circles more intuitive and fun, without piercing the paper as you would with a compass, the Iris comes with a guide engraved on the side of the metallic ring, allowing you to control the size of the circle to the nearest millimeter, while going all the way from a minimum of 0mm to a maximum of 70mm.

An unusually beautiful looking instrument with a vintage touch, the Iris comes with a sheet metal aperture and a thin, machined brass construction, allowing it to be incredibly thin yet precise, with just the right tolerances to enable the aperture to open and close gracefully. The Iris also comes with a wooden stand that allows you to put it on display. The stand, aside from being a platform for the trophy-like Iris, also serves as an aligning tool, allowing you to position the Iris with respect to any given center… unlike those run-of-the-mill compasses which left bullet-wounds in our paper.

Compatible with all drawing tools from pencils to pens, the Iris is less of a geometry tool and more of a precious keepsake… one that also allows you to make the most beautifully perfect circles your eyes have ever seen!

Designer: Odin Ardagh

Click Here to Buy Now: $102 $117 (10% off). Hurry, less than 72 hours left!

About Iris

The Iris by Makers Cabinet is your perfect tool for drawing and measuring circles. Simply rotate the rings to open and close its captivating aperture mechanism. Iris will inspire you with every stroke of your pencil.

A Tool to Inspire

Makers Cabinet believe that drawing and writing tools should guide the path towards creativity rather than limit its potential. Instead of being a burdening generic tool the Iris is intuitive and unique. Its mesmerizing mechanism sparks delight in everyone that sees it open and close. They believe that the Iris helps rejuvenate the flow of creativity at moments of mental block.

The Inspiration

They noticed that camera apertures were reliable mechanisms and were surprised that they had not yet been developed for other purposes. In response to this observation, they designed an instrument that brings the quality of the camera aperture to your desk.

Benefits

The mechanism of the camera aperture has endured 200 years of photographic history. Owing to this resilience, the Iris is the perfect replacement to the inadequate rotary drawing compass.

Rotary compasses are:

– Difficult to hold
– Useless without a ruler
– Restricted to certain mark-making tools
– Immortalised by the holes in our pages

Iris is:

– Easy to use
– Compatible with any mark-making tool
– An accurate measuring instrument
– Seamless on your page

Design, Materaiality & Craft

Its rings are machined from solid brass that patinas, improving with time and use. The leaves are resistant to ink and graphite as they are stamped from carefully selected stainless spring steel that retains its shape. The Iris houses twenty intricately designed leaves that enable you to create accurate circles with every stroke of your pencil.

Base

The base locates the centre-point of a circle. To achieve this, simply lay the Iris flat on your surface and place the base against the inside of the aperture. This added feature enables you to take your drawings to the next level.

Click Here to Buy Now: $102 $117 (10% off). Hurry, less than 72 hours left!

AZIO’s gorgeous Iris keyboard is inspired by vintage cameras

AZIO is a company that makes keyboards that look as good as they feel when you type on them, and at Computex it was showing off the prototype for its next device. The AZIO Iris draws inspiration from the design of old-fashioned rangefinder cameras, f...

Iris scanner AI can tell the difference between the living and the dead

It's possible to use a dead person's fingerprints to unlock a device, but could you get away with exploiting the dead using an iris scanner? Not if a team of Polish researchers have their way. They've developed a machine learning algorithm that can...

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Headband-less Headphones are a Thing Now

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This peculiar pack of headphones combines the freedom and flexibility of wireless earbuds with the isolation and audio quality of on-ear phones. Ergonomically adapted to attach to each independently, they easily slide on and stay put. Rather than take them out of your ears when you want to converse or better hear your environment, a simple swipe of the finger over the earpiece will trigger them to open. It’s almost as if you were wearing nothing on your ears at all. Swipe again to reactivate the enclosure mechanism and you’ll be immersed in your favorite tunes or entertainment again. What’s more is, when you join both earpieces, Iris becomes a Bluetooth speaker for background noise or livening up any atmosphere!

Designers: Mauricio Carvajal & Susana Restrepo

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Amazon meets drone meets hyperloop!

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Honestly, if there were any company meddling with innovative consignment delivery, it would probably be Amazon. Known to be a company that isn’t shy to push boundaries, they’ve got their fingers in every domain possible. The final frontier? Transportation! The Iris was developed as a concept to help Amazon get their deliveries done a whole lot faster.

These massive electric trains would carry Amazon cargo via rail to different parts of the country. However, upon reaching a destination, last-mile delivery of packages would be made via drones that dock inside the top of the train. Iris aims at using current infrastructure like railroads as their mode of operations, and hopefully becoming effective enough to democratize itself and offer its services to the likes of FedEx and UPS. The concept aims to tackle the entire delivery chain by creating one single solution that takes care of the entire A to Z (Amazon joke!) of deliveries. Hey, as long as I get same-day deliveries!

Designers: Martin Rico & Charles Bombardier (Imaginactive).

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The Galaxy S8 iris scanner can be hacked with aging tech

Biometrics are becoming our next de facto security measure, and they're supposed to be a vast improvement on easily-forgotten and hackable passwords. Yet a point-and-shoot camera, laser printer and contact lens is all it took for German hacking group...