The Umbrella That Makes Kids Chase Their Own Shadow

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Most sun safety products for kids follow the same playbook: bright colors, cartoon prints, maybe a fun shape. They’re designed to appeal to parents, not children, which is probably why half of them end up abandoned in school bags by 10 a.m. Studio torinoko, a Japanese design studio, took a very different approach.

Their latest project is called Kage no Otomodachi, which translates to Shadow Friends, and it’s a children’s umbrella that projects illustrated characters onto the ground when held open in direct sunlight. That’s the entire premise, and it’s so elegantly simple that you wonder why no one thought of it before.

Designer: studio torinoko

The way it works is almost effortlessly clever. The umbrella’s canopy features illustrated cutouts that cast playful, character-like figures onto the pavement below. When a child opens it on a sunny day, a little shadow companion appears at their feet, inviting them to follow, chase, and walk alongside it. The child stays under the umbrella. The umbrella keeps them out of the sun. Nobody had to argue about it.

This is behavioral design doing exactly what it’s supposed to do: shifting behavior not through enforcement but through genuine appeal. The studio describes it as a move away from “forcing protective behaviors” toward creating the conditions that make children want to protect themselves. It’s a subtle but important distinction, and it matters a lot in the context of where we’re heading with summer temperatures globally. We’re not just dealing with a UV index inconvenience anymore. We’re dealing with heat that poses real risk, especially to kids who are outside walking to school or playing during peak sun hours.

What stands out most about this design is that it respects the child as a user, not just a passive recipient of adult decisions. Children have a near-universal fascination with shadows. They stomp on them, race them, try to escape them. Studio torinoko didn’t just understand that; they built an entire product philosophy around it. The result is an umbrella a kid will actually want to carry, which is arguably the hardest design problem of all.

The umbrella debuts in a single turquoise-blue colorway, chosen specifically for visibility and ease of recognition outdoors. It also features reflective details for added safety during rainy weather and evening walks, which shows the team was thinking beyond the obvious use case. It’s a considered, holistic design rather than a one-trick novelty.

From a purely aesthetic standpoint, I love how restrained it is. The magic isn’t in the umbrella itself but in what it casts below, which means the object doesn’t need to work hard visually. It doesn’t scream at you. It just quietly does something wonderful when the sun hits it right. That kind of understated design intelligence doesn’t come around often, especially in the children’s products market, where “louder” almost always wins.

Studio torinoko has also stated that they hope future production runs will expand into additional colors and further refinements, with a broader goal of normalizing parasol use among children in general. That cultural angle is worth noting. Parasol culture is well-established in Japan and parts of East Asia as a practical, everyday sun protection habit, but it remains far less common in Western markets for kids specifically. If Shadow Friends helps shift that, even slightly, it’s doing something well beyond its immediate design brief.

It’s rare to come across a product that feels genuinely joyful without being gimmicky. Shadow Friends manages that balance. It’s not trying to be a toy. It’s not trying to be a collectable. It’s trying to be a useful, protective everyday object that a child will actually form a relationship with, and the shadow play is the bridge that makes that relationship possible. If good design is about solving real problems beautifully, this is a near-perfect example. The problem is real, the solution is beautiful, and the mechanism is pure delight. That doesn’t happen as often as it should.

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This Retro Arcade Machine Folds Into A Furniture Cabinet Right Out Of Pottery Barn

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You bring home a new piece of furniture. It’s a handsome, mid-century modern style cabinet in a rich walnut finish, and your partner is frankly stunned. They thought your design sensibilities peaked at a framed movie poster, yet here is this sophisticated, adult-looking object that actually complements the living room. They nod, impressed. The next evening, they go to open one of the doors, planning to store some coasters or maybe a few new wine glasses. Except the handle is just for show, and the doors don’t open. The look of confusion on their face is priceless, because they’re about to learn your secret.

That’s because this beautiful cabinet is a beautifully crafted lie. The front panel doesn’t swing open; it unlocks and folds down to reveal a two-player control deck. The entire top half then pivots upward, extending into a full-height marquee that glows with the promise of 8-bit glory. In seconds, the quiet, respectable piece of furniture has undergone a transformation worthy of a Saturday morning cartoon, revealing itself to be the Swap Arcade. It’s the ultimate stealth entertainment system, hiding in plain sight and waiting for your friends to come over.

Designers: Les Cookson & Ken Higginson

The brainchild of Les Cookson and Ken Higginson out of Lincoln, California, the Swap Arcade tackles a very real problem for gaming enthusiasts who happen to live in actual homes with actual partners who have actual opinions about décor. Closed, it sits at a compact 36 inches tall with a footprint slim enough to tuck against any wall. Open, it rises to a full 70 inches with a 27-inch HDMI display, built-in speakers, and a two-player control panel loaded with SANWA joysticks.

The transformation is handled by a counterbalanced mechanism that manages the weight as the hideaway arcade moves up and down, keeping the movement smooth and controlled rather than the kind of chaotic reveal that ends with someone’s fingers in the wrong place. Once fully open, front corner locking pins secure the arcade immediately after transformation, with a second redundant set at the rear corners for added stability, keeping everything firmly locked in place before anyone even thinks about touching a joystick.

Running on a Raspberry Pi 4 with Batocera preinstalled and a starter library of 100 games, the machine is ready to play straight out of the box, a self-contained gaming system from day one. From there, thousands of additional retro titles can be loaded, giving access to a huge library of arcade, console, and retro favorites through one clean multicade interface. The controls run through a Brook Zero-Pi Fighting Board encoder, adding compatibility with Nintendo Switch, Switch 2, PS3, PS2, the original PlayStation, and PC via X-Input. Hook up a Nintendo Switch Online subscription and suddenly you have access to classic Nintendo libraries on a proper stand-up cabinet. Connect a PC and play arcade-style games through Steam. The machine evolves with what you already own.

Cookson clearly had no intention of letting the furniture half of the equation slide. The cabinet shell is actual wood, and the unfinished bare wood option means it can be stained or painted to suit any interior. Three finished options are also available, Natural, Walnut, or Dark Tobacco, each looking convincingly like something sourced from a design-forward furniture store. For anyone wanting something completely custom, a graphic designer and printer can create custom vinyl decals using almost any artwork, making the Swap Arcade truly personal. The nostalgia you’re chasing here is entirely your own to define.

The lower section includes built-in storage for game systems, controllers, cables, and accessories, accessible when the Swap Arcade is opened into arcade mode… or maybe some of those wine glasses your partner wanted to originally store. It’s a detail that keeps the illusion perfectly intact. When closed, nothing gives the game away.

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The Thermostat That Finally Looks Like It Was Designed

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At some point, every well-designed room has a thermostat on the wall. And at some point, nearly every well-designed room has been slightly let down by it. That’s the quiet irony of home design. We agonize over paint colors, hunt for the perfect light fixtures, spend weekends debating sofa legs, and then right there at eye level lives a beige plastic rectangle covered in tiny buttons that no one fully understands. We’ve simply accepted it as the ugly compromise of functional living.

Uriel Electronics, a design-focused electronics brand, apparently decided that compromise is no longer necessary. Their new temperature controllers, the USH-02 and the UEH-02, make a surprisingly compelling argument that utility and beauty don’t have to negotiate a truce. They can just coexist, elegantly, without one apologizing to the other.

Designer: Uriel Electronics

I’ll be upfront: I didn’t expect to have strong opinions about thermostats. But these two pieces carry a clarity of intention that’s difficult to walk past. Both models are built around the same core idea: strip away the complexity, keep only what matters, and make it look like it belongs on the wall rather than just stuck to it. A single rotary dial. A clean display showing the temperature. A refined body that reads more like a considered object than a hardware accessory. No confusing menu navigation, no crowded button grid, no searching through a manual to figure out how to lower the temperature by two degrees.

The USH-02 is the surface-mounted version, and it’s the one with visible personality. Its translucent skeleton design lets you glimpse the hardware inside, which feels like a little gift to anyone who appreciates how things are made. The graphic detailing adds visual wit to what could have easily been a clean but flat minimalist slab. It sits on the wall in a way that makes you actually stop and look, which is a strange thing to say about a thermostat, but here we are. It doesn’t disappear into the surface; it quietly introduces itself.

The UEH-02 takes the opposite route. Flush-mounted and incredibly slim, it’s designed to nearly vanish. The profile barely protrudes from the wall, creating the kind of visual quiet that interior designers specifically obsess over. If the USH-02 says “notice me,” the UEH-02 says “I’m here, I work perfectly, and I won’t interrupt your space.” Both approaches are valid. Both are well-executed. The choice between them is really just a question of how much personality you want your walls to carry.

The discipline behind this project is worth calling out. It is genuinely difficult to design something that is both beautiful and immediately intuitive, especially in a category most manufacturers have treated as purely functional. Removing complexity rather than adding features is a confident design move, and we’re living through a moment when more is still frequently mistaken for better in tech. Seeing a product that resolves itself into a single tactile dial and a clear display feels almost like a statement. The rotary control has a satisfying physicality that touchscreens never quite manage to replicate. High-end audio equipment and quality appliances have kept the dial alive for exactly this reason: turning something to get a result is one of the most natural gestures there is. It’s a reminder that good design often means returning to what already worked, done with more intention.

The engineering side, visible in the controllers’ back panels, confirms this isn’t just a surface-deep exercise. Components are neatly organized, an Omron relay handles the heavy work, and the specs support voltages between 85V and 265VAC with a max current of 18A. The function is serious. The form just happens to be beautiful.

That balance is rarer than it should be. Home tech has long been given a pass on aesthetics in a way that furniture or lighting simply would not tolerate. Uriel Electronics is quietly making the argument that it shouldn’t. Your thermostat is on your wall every single day, in full view of everyone who walks into that room. It might as well earn its place there.

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A New Electric Hypercar Just Packed 3,154 HP and a 550km/h Top Speed Into a Prototype GT

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WIRED called them the brands that stole the show, and at CES Las Vegas in January 2026, KOSMERA arrived with a four-door high-performance GT prototype wearing a blue-black finish that New Atlas described as magnificent in person, noting its low-sloping hood, big rear wing, and dual-layer diffuser. SupercarBlondie’s verdict was equally direct: “a race car from the year 2199.” For a company that almost no one in the room had encountered before that week, the response was the kind that established brands spend decades trying to manufacture. KOSMERA’s founders, whose engineering lineage runs from China’s earliest quad-rotor UAV programs through 100,000 RPM-class digital motors and autonomous chassis research, had spent years building toward this moment. The car on the floor was proof that the preparation had translated.

The company calls itself “born global by design,” combining Chinese speed of innovation, American AI ambition, German engineering discipline, and Italian emotional design language into one evolving brand vision. R&D centers sit across Beijing, Suzhou, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Los Angeles, with the design studio operating out of Turin and manufacturing anchored in Brandenburg, Germany. From hypercars and high-performance GTs to luxury all-terrain SUVs, KOSMERA is building a product portfolio powered by a shared foundation of performance, intelligence, and software-defined mobility. That portfolio breaks down into a collector-series hypercar called The Hypera, a pair of high-performance GTs in the Star Matrix and Star Razer, and a luxury all-terrain SUV called Terra. At the center of every vehicle is a quad-motor AWD system targeting 3,154 horsepower, a 0-100 km/h time of 1.7 seconds, and a top speed of 550 km/h.

Designer: KOSMERA

The Star Matrix is KOSMERA’s interpretation of intelligent performance built around balance, with an aluminum spaceframe wrapped in carbon-fiber panels, starburst rear lighting with a speed-responsive dynamic flow animation, and an acceleration pulse effect that makes the tail of the car feel alive at night. Designed as a next-generation high-performance GT, it combines extreme electric performance with aerodynamic efficiency and driver-focused ergonomics. Physical controls inside are reduced by 80 percent, leaving a driver environment of carbon fiber, aerospace textiles, and Alcantara with an AI Coach display projecting real-time racing lines and blind-spot alerts into the driver’s eyeline. The Star Razer carries the same architecture into wilder territory, arriving in Quantum Violet with frameless doors, a lower and wider stance, a breathing light bar, and a Cd of 0.20 achieved through aero blade lines and rear wheel channels. Where the Star Matrix reads as precision, the Star Razer reads as provocation.

Kosmera Star Matrix

Axial-flux motors redirect magnetic flow along the rotation axis rather than radially, producing a shorter magnetic path and better torque leverage in a far more compact package, and the HyperDrive quad-rotor layout delivers up to 1,578 PS on a single shaft, achieving nearly twice the power density of conventional motors. The quad-rotor configuration targets 1,160 kW per axle, 7,500 Nm of peak wheel torque, and wheel-end speeds above 4,000 rpm. The power electronics use a full silicon-carbide inverter architecture, reducing conduction loss by approximately 40 percent compared to conventional silicon systems. Four independent motors deliver per-wheel torque vectoring, shaping cornering through real-time torque redistribution rather than braking intervention, a more precise and faster-reacting control philosophy. KOSMERA describes each axle as comparable to two Ferrari V12 engines combined, and for once the metaphor and the physics actually align.

The HyperCore battery’s cell-to-pack architecture eliminates the module layer, pushing pack efficiency to 85 percent and enabling peak discharge above 2,500 kW on a 1,200-volt, 6C platform. Charging targets 10 to 80 percent in under seven minutes, a figure that starts collapsing the practical gap between an EV charge stop and a combustion fuel stop. KOSMERA’s HyperPilot Vision-Language-Action stack runs on a 2,000-TOPS compute platform with LiDAR, millimeter-wave radar, cameras, IMU, and HD mapping feeding a physics-based World Model architecture capable of predictive reasoning. The system covers predictive track mapping, an AI racing coach, AR headset integration, highway L3 assisted driving, and urban Navigate-on-Autopilot. The Star Razer extends the ecosystem further, adding an onboard drone interface that deploys autonomous UAVs for last-mile logistics, emergency delivery, and aerial capture, functioning as a mobile mothership for intelligent mobility. That prediction layer shifts the system from reactive driver assistance to genuinely anticipatory control.

FlexBase integrates drive, braking, steering, and suspension into a fully by-wire architecture with a closed-loop response time under 10 milliseconds, a latency figure that approaches the point where human perception cannot distinguish digital from mechanical control feel. A maximum steering angle of 90 degrees enables zero-radius turning and crab-walk capability that conventional suspension geometry cannot approach. Four-wheel independent control includes automatic compensation for single-wheel failure, and the ASIL-D safety certification aligns the platform with L4 autonomy requirements. KOSMERA claims the electrified integration reduces overall system cost and weight by 30 percent by eliminating components rather than replacing them. The modular chassis is designed to scale across the entire vehicle lineup, from The Hypera to Terra, meaning each model shares a validated foundation rather than developing bespoke hardware from scratch.

Kosmera Star Razer

Kosmera Star Razer

AutoEvolution placed KOSMERA’s 1.7-second 0-60 claim squarely in “a league where Rimacs and Koenigseggs have been making the rules for years,” and that is the competitive frame the brand has chosen for itself. The Axion Power propulsion division confirmed in June 2026 that the 3,000-plus horsepower system remains in pre-development and patent application review, a qualifier worth holding onto when reading the headlines. What exists today is a technically serious platform grounded in axial-flux motor engineering, 1,200-volt battery architecture, AI-driven chassis control, and software-defined mobility. The founding team’s background spans decades of experience in AI, robotics, autonomous systems, and high-speed motor engineering, which means the ambition carries real engineering DNA behind it. Whether KOSMERA can close the gap between concept-stage intensity and production-validated performance will be the story worth watching through the rest of the decade.

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The90Gem smart necklace tracks UV exposure in real-time for sensible skincare

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Wearables are targeting most of our burning health concerns, but sun exposure damage is still in the guessing game. Stacy Salvi, who has previously led the acquisition of Fitbit by Google, and is a health expert when it comes to tech wearables, wants skincare to be more considerate when it comes to active sun exposure. Under her new venture, The90, Stacy has launched the Gem wearable that looks like a stylish round necklace for women.

On the inside, the wearable has a built-in UV sensor to track the skin’s UV exposure in real time. The gadget makes complete sense, as most of the time we are left guessing about the real exposure to damaging Sun rays, and are dependent on integrated weather apps’ UV index, which only show generic localised data. Gem goes beyond that and actively tracks the real-time exposure, whether you are lounging in the mid-day Sun or spending afternoons sitting near an office window. It basically takes out the guesswork and focuses on the real-time solution.

Designer: The90

The90Gem keeps a tab of the UVA and UVB data received from the sensors in real time, and over time builds a personal skincare profile that is actually beneficial. “The90 transforms sunscreen from a one-time morning ritual into an adaptive, responsive system built around your actual UV load,” Salvi said. Micromanaging the skin type, sunscreen used, and any sun-protective clothing that you’re wearing is another feature of the accompanying app. For now, the wearable is specifically targeted towards women who tend to be more informed about the risks of UV exposure. The brand, however, eventually wants to expand the product line to men and children as well.

Detecting UVA and UVB exposure is one part of the wearable. The most important bit is the timely beaming of notifications for sunscreen application, or a reminder of the sun protection habits that should eventually be ingrained in your muscle memory. The app also provides data on Vitamin D targets for a mindful suncare routine. The Gem is essentially a titanium case with the sensor inside, wholly encapsulated in a pendant. The battery on the gadget should last for around a week on a single charge, but that remains to be seen in real-world usage.

This piece of smart jewellery is available in silver or gold finish to complete the aesthetic look. Priced at $299, The90 Gem wearable is just borderline affordable for a specific benefit, but the members of The Skinny Confidential community can get it for an exclusive price of $199 in the early access offer. The company also has plans to incorporate the smart wearable as other items as well, which should further expand the options to gauge your sun exposure in style.

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