Author Archives: Sarang Sheth

Rolls-Royce Firmament Concept Turns the Hood Into a Meteor Shower Chasing the Spirit of Ecstasy

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Every shooting star you have ever wished on was actually dying. What looks like a streak of pure light tearing across the sky is a rock disintegrating, burning up in its final seconds, and yet we treat that death as a gift, a wish granted. Stars carry the same contradiction. The calcium in your bones and the iron in your blood were forged inside a star that had to die violently to scatter those elements across the universe. Creation and destruction run on the same fuel line, not as metaphor but as literal astrophysics. French design student Gaspard Deveugle built an entire Rolls-Royce concept around that exact paradox.

Called Firmament, the concept deletes the vertical Pantheon grille that has anchored every Rolls-Royce face for a century. A low, pointed nose takes its place, tapering to a blade like a ship’s hull. Streaks of light rain across the hood and glass roof, dense near the windshield and scattering into faint dust toward the tip, the way a meteor burns brightest right before it disappears. The pattern converges on the Spirit of Ecstasy, as if she is the one point catching everything falling from the sky. It is the loudest thing on the car, and everything else has been quieted to let it read clearly.

Designer: Gaspard Deveugle

Deveugle is a 3D design student based in Valenciennes, France, with internship experience across BMW, Kingfisher, and RealNum, and Firmament sits inside a portfolio built almost entirely on reinterpreting storied marques. He has rendered a Bentley Speed 8 tribute, sketched a Bugatti Type 52, built cafe racer studies off Harley Davidson and Moto Guzzi platforms, and designed a yacht concept called Arcane. Firmament arrives as an internship project rather than a factory commission, posted on Behance alongside a companion breakdown of the sketch and modeling process behind it. That distinction matters here. Nobody at Goodwood signed off on deleting the grille, which frees the concept to treat Rolls-Royce’s most sacred design element as raw material rather than untouchable heritage.

Rolls-Royce has already flirted with turning night sky into physical form, just never on the outside of the car. The Ghost introduced its fiber-optic Starlight headliner in 2014, a swath of black leather stitched with over a thousand tiny points of light, and Spectre pushed that further with more than five thousand illuminated points woven into the dashboard fascia. Both live entirely inside the cabin, visible only to whoever paid for the seat. Firmament takes that same instinct and turns it inside out, moving the starfield from the headliner to the hood where anyone on the street can see it. That single move reframes a private luxury detail as the entire visual identity of the car.

The mood board Deveugle built around the idea, titled Power of Duality, leans on real astrophysics rather than loose poetry. Stars manufacture heavy elements inside their cores through nucleosynthesis, then have to die violently to scatter that material across the universe, meaning creation and destruction share the same fuel line by necessity, not metaphor. His reference imagery pairs a comet’s frozen tail with a supernova’s radial burst and a single meteor reflected over open water, the visual grammar he then translated onto sheet metal. That grounding shows in how the streak pattern behaves on the car itself. It thickens where energy would concentrate and thins where it would dissipate, following a logic borrowed from physics rather than instinct.

The rest of the surfacing supports that reading without competing for attention. A raised black spine splits the rear deck into twin fenders that taper to points, a quiet nod to Rolls-Royce’s own boat-tail coachbuilding, though it plays a supporting role here rather than the headline. Dark, turbine bladed wheels replace the static hubcaps Rolls-Royce is known for, hardware that stays upright on its axle no matter how fast the wheel spins, trading serenity for something closer to a hypercar’s stance. There are no visible door handles or shutlines anywhere in the renders, just one continuous poured surface running from nose to tail. Every panel gap that would normally interrupt a Rolls-Royce silhouette has been resolved into a single, unbroken skin.

None of this is destined for Goodwood’s production line, and that is fine. Firmament works precisely because it is unburdened by the things a real Rolls-Royce has to solve, crash structures, pedestrian safety, a grille that still needs to cool something even on an EV. What it offers instead is a sharp piece of brand thinking from a student still building his portfolio, taking a hundred-year-old grille and a hood ornament everyone stopped truly looking at and making both feel dangerous again. Rolls-Royce spends real engineering effort making its cars feel weightless and silent. Deveugle’s answer is to make one look like it just survived a meteor storm, closer to what the Spirit of Ecstasy was always chasing.

The post Rolls-Royce Firmament Concept Turns the Hood Into a Meteor Shower Chasing the Spirit of Ecstasy first appeared on Yanko Design.

“Adaptive Reuse” Housing in NYC Reshapes Aging Brick Superblock Into An Interconnected Society

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Cities have gotten very good at stacking people on top of each other and very bad at getting those people to actually interact. High density housing solves a real estate problem while quietly creating a social one, isolating seniors on one floor and young families on another with nothing but an elevator connecting them. Architect Yi Lu looked at this fragmentation and asked what it would take to reverse it without bulldozing the buildings already holding millions of people. Her answer, submitted to the A’ Design Award, treats an aging superblock not as a liability but as raw material for a new kind of social infrastructure. It is ambitious, a little sculptural, and grounded in something most housing renewal proposals ignore entirely.

The project, titled The Intergenerational Commons, targets Stuyvesant Town, New York City’s massive postwar housing development, as its test case. Lu’s proposal keeps roughly 75 to 85 percent of the existing floor area as housing while converting the rest into a revitalized podium, rooftop kindergartens, and a network of terraces threading through the brick shell. The renderings have a strange, compelling silhouette to them, cylindrical brick towers twisting up past staggered floor plates, like Michel de Klerk got handed Frank Gehry’s sketchbook. A horizontal community spine activates street level life, while stairs, lifts, and terraces stitch the floors together into what Lu describes as a continuous social landscape. The result looks sculptural from the outside and feels intentional from within, which is a harder balance to strike than either quality on its own.

Designer: Yi Lu

Stuyvesant Town was built as postwar efficiency housing, rows of near identical brick towers designed to move people through the city’s housing shortage as fast as possible. That efficiency came at the cost of any real social texture, and decades later the superblock reads as functional but flat, a place people live rather than a place people encounter each other. Lu’s retrofit does not fight that brick language so much as bend it, pulling curved, tower-like volumes out of the existing grid and letting them collide at odd angles. Load-bearing steel reinforcement and reversible insertions allow the new geometry to sit on top of the old structure without gutting it. The brick stays, but its logic changes completely, from repetition to rupture.

A standardized kit of parts, built around 3,600 millimeter modular bays and lightweight steel framing, lets construction happen in phases without displacing current residents, a constraint that kills most ambitious renewal proposals before they leave the page. Bolt on terraces extend outward from the existing brick shell, adding outdoor space that the original superblock never had. A 1,200 square meter community hub anchors street level activity, while stacked shared terraces and a 300 millimeter green roof system carry that social infrastructure upward through the building. None of it requires the wholesale demolition that usually accompanies large scale housing renewal.

The interesting part is how Lu orchestrates ‘intergenerational’ overlapping zones, connecting seniors and children rather than the more common strategy of designating separate zones for each. Rooftop kindergartens sit close enough to senior learning spaces on the revitalized podium that informal encounters happen without anyone having to schedule them. Interaction stays optional throughout, preserving privacy for residents who want it while making mutual support available for those who do not. That flexibility separates the proposal from the well-meaning but rigid intergenerational housing models that came before it. Whether a project this structurally ambitious ever gets built at Stuyvesant Town is a separate question from whether it should, and Lu’s entry makes a genuinely compelling case for the second one.

The post “Adaptive Reuse” Housing in NYC Reshapes Aging Brick Superblock Into An Interconnected Society first appeared on Yanko Design.

Forget Smart Homes, Moooi Is Designing Homes That Feel Alive

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Light moves through trees. Shadows stretch and shrink. No two afternoons ever look quite the same. Moooi wants your living room to borrow that same restlessness. In a conversation with Yanko Design, the Dutch design house laid out a vision for interiors that respond to time, mood and the people living inside them, rather than staying frozen in one fixed arrangement from the day they’re installed.

It is a strange kind of ambition for a furniture brand to have. Strange but brilliant. Moooi has spent 25 years refusing to make boring things, and its next chapter looks less like a product catalog and more like a philosophy for how homes should feel. Not smarter. Not more automated. Just more alive, in the same unpredictable way the outside world already is.

Designer: Moooi

The concept has a name, The Living Room, and it started as a simple question the brand kept circling back to. What if an interior never sat still, but moved through a day the way the world outside a window does, gradually and without announcing itself. Lighting could soften as morning turns to afternoon. Objects could shift subtly in response to who’s in the room and what they’re doing. Nothing about it reads as gimmick or gadgetry, which is deliberate, since Moooi keeps insisting this has nothing to do with sensors or automation. It reads instead like weather indoors, a mood that drifts rather than a setting you toggle. That distinction matters more than it sounds.

Atmosphere has subtly become the real product Moooi sells, and everything else follows from it. The brand says its process now starts with a single question, how do people want to feel the moment they walk in, long before anyone picks a fabric or a finish. That thinking explains why Moooi’s catalog has crept well past furniture and lighting into wallcoverings, carpets, ceramic tiles and even bespoke scent. Each addition exists to thicken the sensory layer of a room rather than decorate its surface. Building a mood board was never the goal. Building an entire world was.

Personalization is where the philosophy stops being poetic and starts getting genuinely strange, in the best sense. Moooi’s collaboration with EveryHuman uses AI to translate a person’s mood into a custom room fragrance, treating scent as another material a designer can shape rather than an afterthought sprayed in before guests arrive. That same instinct extends to digitally printed carpets and layered surfaces built around individual taste instead of a single house style. The brand frames this as giving creative tools to people rather than finished products, which flips the usual furniture relationship on its head. You are not buying a chair here. You are being handed the freedom to keep shaping a space as your own taste evolves.

None of this would land without Moooi’s oldest habit, which the brand still describes as an ambition to stop the boring business. That mantra showed up loudly at the brand’s 25th anniversary installation in Milan this year, a mirrored, multi sensory environment built at Superstudio Più with choreographer Yoann Bourgeois, layering light, movement and scent into something meant to be felt rather than simply viewed. Marcel Wanders has said there’s no one who walks through a Moooi installation feeling nothing, and that stubborn refusal to be neutral is the connective tissue between a 2001 startup and a 2026 AI fragrance experiment.

Where this goes next is of more consequence than where it started. Moooi has been clear that technology should function as another creative material, sitting alongside craft and color rather than steering the whole show. If The Living Room concept ever leaves the realm of installation and lands inside actual homes, it will be a genuinely different pitch than anything coming out of the smart home industry right now. Not a house that watches you. A house that keeps you company.

The post Forget Smart Homes, Moooi Is Designing Homes That Feel Alive first appeared on Yanko Design.

Narwal’s Flow 2 White: A Robot Vacuum For Homes With Babies, Pets, and Great Taste

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Every new parent knows which household sounds can end a nap. The dishwasher at the wrong moment. A phone notification set too loud. Or the low mechanical hum of a cleaning robot that has no awareness of the three-month-old who just fell asleep six feet away. The usual workaround has always been the same: pause the schedule, rezone the map, or carry the robot somewhere farther from the nursery before the nap timer starts. Robot vacuums have become impressively good at reading floors. Reading the life happening above those floors has been a much rarer skill.

That is part of what makes Narwal’s Flow 2 White interesting. Yes, this is the brand’s 2026 flagship in a new pure white colorway built for modern, light-toned interiors. Yes, the industrial design has been carefully tuned around a quieter, more architectural presence in the home. But one of the clearest expressions of that thinking is Baby Care Mode, which supports quieter cleaning around nursery areas while toy recognition logs misplaced items on the map after each run. In other words, the design story here goes deeper than color. It is about a robot vacuum that has started adapting itself to the rhythms of the room.

Designer: Narwal

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The robot vacuum category spent most of the 2020s competing on suction numbers. 10,000 Pa became 20,000, then 31,000, and somewhere in that escalation the floors got clean enough that raw power stopped being an interesting conversation. The smarter brands pivoted toward perception: cameras, obstacle recognition, map intelligence, multi-floor awareness. That shift produced genuinely useful improvements. But the household as a social environment, full of schedules, sleeping infants, anxious pets, and the particular chaos of family life, has remained something the machine cleans around rather than one it genuinely accounts for. Most robot vacuums know how to move through a home. Far fewer seem designed around how a home actually feels.

Flow 2 White leans into that missing layer from the moment you look at it. Narwal’s new colorway is framed around what the brand calls a quiet luxury approach, and the visual cues back that up. The base station uses a frosted glass-textured front panel that catches and softens light rather than bouncing it harshly back into the room. A slim ambient status light bar communicates the robot’s state with a low-key visual rhythm. The semi-enclosed silhouette gives the dock and robot a more unified presence, so the whole system feels composed rather than pieced together. In homes shaped by pale wood, cream textiles, soft daylight, and open-plan layouts, that kind of approach shows how much Narwal sees their tech as functional decor built around their ‘quiet luxury’ ethos.

It also helps that the softer aesthetic is tied to behavior, not only appearance. Baby Care Mode returns the conversation from styling to use, because it shows how Narwal is thinking about domestic context in practical terms. A quieter cleaning mode around nursery areas is the sort of feature that immediately makes sense to anyone who has rearranged an entire evening around a sleeping child. Toy recognition adds another layer of household awareness, turning the robot’s mapping system into something slightly more useful than a floor plan with room labels. It starts to feel like a machine designed with family life in mind, rather than one designed in isolation and later dropped into it.

Underneath that calmer exterior, Narwal has kept the flagship hardware story intact. The proprietary FlowWash Mopping System uses a high-speed track mop that rotates at over 100 times per minute and delivers 140 degree Fahrenheit heated water to keep the mop clean throughout each cycle. On paper that reads like another premium cleaning spec. In practice, it addresses one of the category’s most persistent weak points: robot mops that push grime around after the first serious spill. Narwal’s treadmill-style self-cleaning approach feels aimed at that exact frustration, especially in kitchens, entryways, and pet-heavy homes where the mess changes texture by the hour. The Flow 2 White also carries 31,000 Pa suction, CarpetFocus technology, a certified detangling system for 0 percent hair tangling, and a self-emptying base station with up to 120 days of maintenance-free use. The visual language may be quieter now, but the performance story has not been dialed down with it.

The same goes for intelligence. Flow 2 White runs on the NarMind™ Pro Autonomous System, which combines an onboard AI processor with a cloud-based VLM Omni Model for broader object recognition and more adaptive obstacle handling. Plenty of brands now promise smarter navigation, but the difference increasingly comes down to how that intelligence is applied. Here, the system adjusts cleaning strategies based on what it detects, improves edge coverage, boosts overall efficiency, and reduces the amount of babysitting the robot needs from the user. Pet Mode detects pet-active areas for deeper cleaning and can help locate pets remotely with Find My Pet, while AI Floor Tag identifies valuable objects and sends alerts through the app. The result sounds technical, but the real appeal is simple: fewer interruptions, fewer rescues, and fewer moments where the robot behaves like it understands the map but not the home.

That may be the strongest case for Flow 2 White as a whole. It arrives at a moment when premium robot vacuums are all converging toward similar checklists of suction, mapping, self-cleaning docks, and AI-assisted navigation. Narwal’s opportunity here lies in pushing the conversation somewhere slightly more mature. The white colorway and quiet luxury detailing make the product easier to live with visually. Features like Baby Care Mode and toy recognition make it easier to live with behaviorally. Together, they point toward a category that is finally thinking beyond floor care alone.

The Narwal Flow 2 White will be available starting July 16 with a launch price of $1,099.99, discounted from its $1,499.99 MSRP through July 31. That places it firmly in flagship territory, where buyers expect strong cleaning performance, meaningful automation, and design that justifies the footprint such a device takes up in the home. For people living in bright, modern interiors, the visual refresh alone will have obvious appeal. For parents, pet owners, and anyone who has grown tired of appliances that treat the home like a test lab instead of a lived space, the more interesting story is the one underneath: a robot vacuum that seems increasingly shaped by the habits, moods, and messes of the people around it.

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The post Narwal’s Flow 2 White: A Robot Vacuum For Homes With Babies, Pets, and Great Taste first appeared on Yanko Design.

This Cantilevered Forest Home in Washington Hovers Above The Trees

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Frank Lloyd Wright hung a house over a waterfall back in the 1930s, and architects have been trying to one up that flex for nearly a century now. Most of them cop out with one dramatic overhang, snap the hero shot for the brochure, and call it a day. DeForest Architects wasn’t interested in that shortcut when they took on a one acre bluff above Puget Sound in Burien, Washington. Instead of picking a single showpiece moment, they let the whole house negotiate its steep, forested site room by room. Some volumes tuck into the hillside, others push out past the tree line, and the living room goes furthest of all, floating above the forest floor like a treehouse that happens to have a structural engineer on payroll. It’s a bold move, and somehow it never tips into spectacle.

Ore Studios handled interiors alongside DeForest’s architecture, and you can tell the two teams never stopped talking to each other, because the shell and the furniture never feel like separate decisions. Floor to ceiling windows framed in thick black steel wrap the living room, turning the surrounding pines into part of the interior instead of scenery you glimpse through glass. Decks stretch off both sides of that suspended room, one facing a woodland meadow, the other facing open water, so the house pulls off two completely different outdoor relationships without moving a single wall. A fireplace anchors the room dead center, and against an otherwise calm, dark palette, a red rug and a blue lounge chair do basically all the emotional heavy lifting. Toth Construction built it, and photographer Haris Kenjar’s shots make it obvious just how restrained the material story stays everywhere else the color doesn’t show up.

Designers: DeForest Architects (John DeForest, Michael Knowles), interiors by Ore Studios

Surrounded by trees on three sides, that living room earns the treehouse comparison honestly rather than just leaning on it as marketing language. The owners wanted something peaceful with room left over for surprise, which sounds like a contradiction until you see how DeForest solved it. Instead of piling on decorative flourishes, they varied elevation and let the forest do most of the visual work through all that glass. A red sofa cushion here, a cobalt lounge chair there, and the room reads as calm and lived in rather than staged for a shoot. It helps that the steel framing is thick enough to feel structural rather than decorative, which keeps the whole glass box from feeling fragile despite hanging in midair above the slope.

That same color language keeps traveling once you leave the living room, which is where a lot of ambitious houses start to lose their nerve. Blue dining chairs with slim metal frames pick up where the lounge chair left off, adding personality without competing with the water views outside. The kitchen sits just beyond, wrapped in walnut cabinetry that swaps the cool palette for something warmer and more tactile. Red accent panels show up again here, a quiet callback to the rug two rooms over, proof that DeForest and Ore Studios were working from the same script rather than improvising room by room. Nothing about the furniture distracts from the forest outside, which seems to be the entire design brief in a nutshell.

The most theatrical detail in the whole house doesn’t come from the glass at all, it comes from a staircase. DeForest based its red steel structure on the fire lookout towers that used to dot ridgelines across the Pacific Northwest, spare utilitarian buildings meant for spotting smoke before anyone else could. As it climbs through the house, the staircase echoes the actual climb up the hillside outside, turning a purely functional element into the closest thing the home has to a sculpture. It’s a small footprint, structurally speaking, but it carries an outsized share of the house’s personality. Painted a saturated red against white walls, it reads less like circulation and more like a piece the owners could have commissioned separately.

Upstairs, the bedroom dials the energy back down without abandoning the color story that runs through the rest of the house. Deep blues show up in the cushions and bedding, playing against grey and black finishes for something that feels genuinely restful rather than sparse. It’s the same restrained material palette found everywhere else in the home, just recalibrated for a room where the goal is sleep rather than entertaining. Large windows keep the forest close even here, so the connection to the site never fully disappears even in the most private room of the house. It’s a quieter moment, but it fits the same internal logic as everything that came before it.

Cantilevered houses tend to live or die by whether the drama feels earned or bolted on as an afterthought, and this one earns it. DeForest Architects and Ore Studios didn’t settle for one showpiece room and call the rest of the house filler, they built an entire structure that keeps renegotiating its relationship to a genuinely difficult site. The fire lookout staircase and the suspended living room could have each carried a project on their own, and here they exist in the same house without stepping on each other. Toth Construction gets credit too, since none of this works if the execution doesn’t match the ambition on paper. Burien, Washington isn’t exactly known as an architecture destination, but this house makes a decent case that it should be.

The post This Cantilevered Forest Home in Washington Hovers Above The Trees first appeared on Yanko Design.

An iPad-Sized Gaming Tablet With Its Own Liquid Cooling System: RedMagic Astra 2

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RedMagic built its reputation by shoving desktop grade cooling into devices that had no business needing it, starting with fans strapped onto gaming phones back when that idea still seemed ridiculous. The company’s 11 Pro phone proved a miniaturized liquid cooling loop could fit inside something you carry in a pocket. Now that same engineering obsession has scaled up into the Astra 2, a tablet that treats visible liquid cooling as its main selling point rather than a novelty. Most tablet makers spend their engineering budget on thinner bezels and lighter frames. RedMagic spent its on keeping the thing from overheating under real, sustained gaming load. That choice alone says a lot about who this tablet is actually built for.

The Astra 2 measures 9.06 inches, close enough to an iPad mini that the comparison writes itself, yet it runs hot enough inside to need actual liquid moving through it. RedMagic says the screen refreshes at up to 185Hz and gets bright enough to use comfortably outdoors, numbers most tablets never bother chasing. Battery life gets a boost too, backed by fast charging that promises short waits between long sessions. Pricing in the US starts at $750, climbing higher for more storage and memory. RedMagic already sells this tablet in China under a different name, and a global release is set for August 26.

Designer: RedMagic

RedMagic runs an actual liquid loop through the chassis, moving heat away from the processor the same way a gaming desktop does, just shrunk down to fit a slab you hold with two hands. A large vapor chamber spreads that heat across a wider surface before it ever gets a chance to build up in one spot. Layered on top is something RedMagic calls Liquid Metal 3.0, a thermal compound that conducts heat far better than the paste most devices settle for. None of this needs to work perfectly to feel like a genuine design statement. Just seeing the concept committed to at this scale is the interesting part.

Powering all that heat generation is Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, paired with RedMagic’s own RedCore R4 chip built specifically to keep frame rates steady during long sessions. That combination explains why the cooling system needed to grow up in the first place. A 9.06 inch OLED panel adds its own heat on top, running at up to 185Hz with brightness RedMagic rates at 1,600 nits, figures that would turn heads on a laptop, let alone a tablet. An 8,300mAh battery and 75W fast charging round things out, aimed squarely at people who game for hours rather than minutes.

Apple and Samsung have spent years convincing buyers that tablets should stay quiet, sealed, and forgettable on the inside. RedMagic is betting there’s an audience that wants the opposite, a device that shows its work and treats visible engineering as a feature rather than a flaw. Whether that logic holds up once the Astra 2 ships in August remains the real test, but the idea itself is hard to ignore.

The post An iPad-Sized Gaming Tablet With Its Own Liquid Cooling System: RedMagic Astra 2 first appeared on Yanko Design.

Google Pixel 11 Amazon Leak: $899-$1899 Price Range, New Colors, and a Surprise ‘Pixel Tag’ Tracker

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At this point, a Google hardware leak ahead of launch feels almost ceremonial. Long before the keynote lights come up, the phones usually arrive in fragments through retailer pages, spec sheets, teaser campaigns, and the wider rumor mill. The Pixel 11 now seems to be following that familiar script, with Amazon reportedly revealing major details early and introducing an unexpected side character in the form of a Pixel Tag tracker ahead of Google’s August 12 event.

The leaked lineup already sketches out Google’s fall hardware palette in surprising detail. The base Pixel 11 appears in Obsidian, Frost, Hibiscus, and Pistachio, with 256GB storage priced at $899. The Pro shifts to Canyon and Obsidian, the Pro XL climbs from $1,299, and the Pixel 11 Pro Fold stretches the range to $1,899 in Obsidian with an Olive variant that may also be tied to the name Pine. Taken together, the colors feel as intentional as the pricing, and the Pixel Tag mention adds one more clue that Google may be building a broader visual ecosystem around the phones rather than treating accessories as an afterthought.

Image Credits: Android Authority

Google appears to be making 256GB the new base storage tier across the Pixel 11 family, which is probably overdue given how aggressively on-device AI has been eating into storage headroom. Droid Life also spotted a 512GB variant priced at $1,019, all but confirming that Google is dropping the longstanding 128GB entry-level option entirely. That’s a sensible call on paper, but it also means buyers have fewer options to quietly trade down on storage to save money at the baseline.

Then the pricing hits, and it hits hard. The Pixel 11 Pro reportedly starts at $1,099 for 256GB in Canyon, with the 1TB configuration reaching $1,449. The Pro XL tops out at $1,649 for 1TB. The Pixel 11 Pro Fold reportedly opens at $1,899 and climbs to $2,249 for a 1TB model. These are numbers that would have seemed audacious five years ago, and in 2026, with the broader economy and RAM shortage doing what it’s doing, I don’t blame you for still wondering what nightmarish timeline we live in. Google is clearly betting that its AI-forward software story justifies the ask, but at nearly $1,900 just to get into Fold territory, it really does feel like Google isn’t betting on this one selling like hot-cakes.

Image Credits: Android Authority

The Pro models also carry an unusual RAM decision I couldn’t help but notice. The 256GB Pixel 11 Pro will reportedly ship with 12GB of RAM, while the 512GB and 1TB variants retain 16GB, a departure from the Pixel 10 Pro lineup where every storage configuration included 16GB. It creates a situation where the least expensive Pro is also the most memory-limited, which sends a strange signal in a product cycle so heavily defined by AI features that depend on RAM headroom to run locally.

One detail on the Fold worth watching is the listed 4,750mAh battery, which would actually be smaller than the Pixel 10 Pro Fold’s 5,015mAh pack. Given that several other listing details appear unfinished, it’s possible this battery figure is also placeholder information. Still, the kind of number that makes you squint twice before scrolling on.

Image Credits: Android Authority

Through all of this, Pixel Tag stays the most intriguing footnote. A first-party tracker from Google would put the company directly in AirTag territory, and while tracker specs are almost beside the point, design language very much is not. Whatever Pixel Tag looks like, it will need to feel at home on a keyring and inside a product lineup simultaneously. If August 12 brings a formal reveal, the smallest object on stage may end up carrying the largest story.

The post Google Pixel 11 Amazon Leak: $899-$1899 Price Range, New Colors, and a Surprise ‘Pixel Tag’ Tracker first appeared on Yanko Design.

See-Through Speaker with a 21.5-inch Transparent Display Turns Your Songs Into Lyric Videos

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Bang & Olufsen perfected the idea of audio equipment as art, creating speakers so sculptural and beautiful they demand to be looked at long before they are ever heard. This approach turned hi-fi systems into statement pieces, architectural elements that shape a room’s aesthetic just as much as they fill it with sound. The price for such artistry, however, often places it in the realm of museum-worthy gallery objects. A new design is taking a similar run at that “look at me” audio philosophy, finding its visual hook through an entirely different and arguably more dynamic method, without the five-figure price tag.

The MorningBlues SonicGlass A1 achieves its visual identity through engineered transparency. Instead of relying on exotic woods or polished aluminum, its beauty comes from revealing the inner workings of sound itself. The speaker’s main diaphragm is a sheet of clear glass, letting you watch the physical driver move and vibrate with the music. This turns the hardware into a performance, a living object that makes sound tangible. MorningBlues calls this “Visualized Music” – a vision where sound, lyrics, motion, and visuals become part of one unified experience rather than separate elements. It’s a clever way to create a decorative speaker that feels both technical and artistic, designed for people who appreciate seeing how their favorite things work.

Designer: MorningBlues

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This focus on a meaningful visual is a refreshing change of pace. We are, after all, intensely visual creatures. For decades, speaker companies have tried to give our eyes something to do while we listen, but the solutions have been uniformly uninspired. We’ve been served an endless buffet of dancing digital equalizers and pulsing RGB lights that flash along to the beat. These features feel disconnected from the soul of the music, reducing a complex song to a simple, repetitive light show. The SonicGlass A1 offers something far more compelling because it taps into the most human element of any track: the story.

It’s basically captions for your music, an idea so immediately brilliant it’s a wonder it took this long to happen. Let’s be honest, almost nobody watches movies anymore without subtitles. Between mumbled dialogue and our own fractured attention spans, seeing the words has become essential. The SonicGlass A1 applies that same logic to listening. It uses its 21.5-inch transparent display to make lyrics appear to float in mid-air, animating and shifting with the rhythm and mood of the song. You can finally catch that one line you’ve been mishearing for years or appreciate the poetry of a verse without breaking the spell to look at your phone.

The real magic here is that the display isn’t just a screen sitting behind glass; the glass is the speaker. The entire front panel is an ultra-thin German Schott glass diaphragm, which vibrates to create sound. This panel is moved by a powerful neodymium magnetic system, turning the whole assembly into a transparent driver. It’s a remarkable piece of acoustic engineering that makes the visual effect feel earned, not tacked on. The transparency goes beyond just the surface, revealing the acoustic movement behind every note and creating a direct, physical link between what you hear and what you see.

This commitment to engineering extends to the audio quality. Inside the sealed enclosure are dual 4-inch full-range drivers powered by a pair of 80W Class-D amplifiers, delivering clean, room-filling stereo sound. The design prioritizes clarity and a balanced, natural reproduction, ensuring vocals are crisp and instruments feel distinct. It also features three different tuning modes, allowing you to tailor the sound profile to your room or your mood. It’s a system designed to prove that a speaker built around a visual novelty can also be a genuinely capable piece of hi-fi equipment.

While the speaker is a stunning object on its own, its personality is shaped through the MorningBlues smartphone app. This is the creative command center where you control the entire visual experience. The app’s “Lyric Lab” lets you customize the fonts, effects, and animations of the floating lyrics, tailoring them to your exact taste. It’s also where you can access the more futuristic AI features, like generating a music video for a favorite song or using a Face Swap tool to put yourself in the performance. For quieter moments, the app lets you display personal photos and videos or choose from a library of mindful meditation scenes, turning the speaker into a dynamic digital canvas.

If the app is the creative hub, the optional Music Hub is the tactile command deck for your entire audio ecosystem. This physical controller is a serious piece of kit, designed to manage your listening experience with dedicated controls. It features a prominent vocal removal button that instantly preps any song for karaoke. More impressively, it acts as a bridge to your existing audio gear, allowing you to pair the SonicGlass A1 with up to three other Bluetooth speakers from any brand. With its own enhanced audio decoding, the Hub ensures all connected speakers sound their best while giving you a single, elegant interface to control your multi-room setup.

This transforms the speaker from a standalone device into a social centerpiece. The combination of easy vocal removal and synchronized lyrics makes it an incredibly fun and intuitive karaoke machine. It’s an artful object for your daily listening, a conversation-starting decor piece when it’s quiet, and an interactive entertainment system when you have friends over. It’s one of the few devices that feels equally at home providing background music for a quiet evening or being the main event at a party.

The standard retail price for the SonicGlass A1 Lyric Speaker is $999. For its launch, MorningBlues is offering a super early bird price of $649. Several bundles are also available to build out a more complete system. A Stereo Pair of two speakers is offered at $1,299, down from a retail of $1,998. The Smart Audio Bundle, which includes one speaker and the Music Hub controller, is available for $849. For those looking to go all-in on the social features, a Karaoke Special bundle includes the speaker, the Music Hub, and a microphone for $879.

Click Here to Buy Now: $646 $999 (35% off). Hurry, only 7/395 left! Raised over $794,000.

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This 4-Player LEGO Chessboard Turns The Game Into Strategic Chaos

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Four-player chess is not some internet-era gimmick dreamed up for group game nights. Variants of it have existed for centuries, from Indian Chaturaji played with dice, to Victorian England’s fascination with elaborate cross-shaped boards designed specifically to seat four rivals at once. The format never quite dethroned standard chess in popularity, mostly because building a proper four-sided board was always a pain, and because the rules needed serious rethinking to keep games from spiraling into total mayhem. It is a format that rewards ambition and punishes anyone who tries to wing it.

That is precisely the gap LEGO Ideas creator CozyBuildingBlocks7126 decided to fill, with a physical, brick-built four-player chessboard that revives the format for a new generation of players, dice optional. The design leans into a cross-shaped layout, four full armies in distinct colors, and, most interestingly, a scoring system engineered specifically to make four-way chess feel less like chaos and more like calculated risk. It is a smart, tactile answer to a format that has always deserved better hardware.

Designer: CozyBuildingBlocks7126

The board itself is the first thing that grabs you, a cross-shaped slab built from 852 pieces and measuring a generous 51.2 by 51.2 centimeters, large enough to comfortably seat four full armies without anyone’s rooks bumping elbows. Blue, yellow, green, and red pieces line up along their respective arms of the cross, and the notched corners where each arm meets the central board are a genuinely clever piece of structural design, letting four ranks sit flush against each other without any awkward diagonal overlap. It reads almost like a plus sign built out of chessboard, which is exactly the kind of geometric problem-solving that separates a thoughtful MOC (my own creation) from a simple recolor job.

My favorite detail, though, is the scoring system, because this is where the design stops being a novelty and starts being a genuine strategic rethink. Pawns promote at the eighth rank instead of the fourteenth, landing them mid-board rather than at the enemy’s doorstep. Bishops are worth five points instead of three, queens born from promoted pawns are quietly capped at just one point, and a checkmate alone is worth a hefty twenty points. Captured kings leave their armies “dead” on the board, meaning their pieces can still be captured but no longer award points to whoever takes them. The result is a game where getting checkmated does not necessarily mean losing, since a well-timed capture can vault you into first or second place even after your king falls. That is a wonderfully devious wrinkle for a build that could have coasted on novelty alone.

The set is still early in its LEGO Ideas run, sitting at 105 supporters with 424 days left on the clock to reach the first milestone of 1,000. It has a long runway ahead before the official 10,000-vote threshold that triggers a LEGO review, but for anyone who has ever wanted to drag chess off the screen and back onto a real table, four opponents included, this is a build worth rallying behind. You can head to the LEGO Ideas page and cast your vote here.

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This $79 Kids’ Wi-Fi Phone Brings Back the Ability to Slam Down a Receiver Like It’s 1995

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The landline died because of the wire, not because of the idea. A physical phone tethered to a wall socket made sense in 1985 and made increasingly less sense every year after, until entire households simply stopped bothering to replace them. Pinwheel’s new release makes the case that the object itself, the tactile handset, the dedicated cradle, the single purpose design, was worth keeping around long after the copper wiring became a liability. Strip out the jack and run the whole thing over Wi-Fi instead, and suddenly a nostalgia object becomes a genuinely practical piece of furniture again. That is the quiet design insight buried inside what looks, at first glance, like a novelty throwback.

Called Pinwheel Home, the device targets kids aged 5 to 10 who need a way to reach approved contacts without inheriting a full smartphone. It plugs into any outlet and pairs with Wi-Fi, meaning it can sit on a kitchen counter or a bedroom shelf without a technician ever showing up. Two versions exist, the smaller Home Spark at 68 dollars and the larger, more decorated Home Classic at 79 dollars, both sold directly through Pinwheel ahead of an Amazon release this fall. Parents control the whole experience through Pinwheel’s Caregiver Portal, approving every contact and setting the hours calls are allowed. The company already makes kid smartwatches, so this slots into a lineup built specifically around delaying smartphone ownership.

Designer: Pinwheel

That oversized handset is not just a styling choice, it is the entire emotional payload of the product. Somewhere in the last two decades, ending a phone call turned into touching a red icon on glass, a gesture with all the drama of dismissing a notification. Home Classic hands a kid an actual weighted receiver and an actual spring loaded cradle, and the moment a call ends, physics takes over. Slam it down hard enough after telling a sibling they are wrong about something, and the whole base rattles. Rest it gently after a call with grandma, and it clicks shut soft as a whisper. That range, from petty dramatic slam to quiet contented click, is a form of emotional expression a swipe gesture has never once offered a five year old, and Pinwheel built the entire handset geometry around making that range possible.

Calling another Pinwheel Home device is free, routed through the company’s own Circle network using a short internal code instead of a standard phone number. Reaching an actual mobile number, like a grandparent’s cell phone, requires a subscription, either 6.99 dollars monthly for a real 10-digit number and five approved contacts, or 9.99 dollars monthly to remove that contact ceiling. Emergency calling stays free no matter what plan a family is on, which is the one place Pinwheel clearly refused to charge across. Home Classic’s stickers might be the hook that gets a kid excited, but the free-versus-paid split is the part parents will actually feel every month.

Pinwheel has already teased three-way calling and tighter integration with its kids’ smartwatches, hinting that a child’s number and approved contacts could eventually follow them from the countertop straight onto their wrist as they get older. That continuity is the real long game here, not the retro shell. A phone that lets a kid slam down a receiver like they mean it sounds like a gimmick, until you realize it might be the only piece of hardware left teaching an entire generation how satisfying hanging up used to feel.

The post This $79 Kids’ Wi-Fi Phone Brings Back the Ability to Slam Down a Receiver Like It’s 1995 first appeared on Yanko Design.