An all-in-one domestic kit to rapidly measure your body temperature and blood oxygen

Meet the “Aware” a standalone kit to quickly detect whether someone is showing underlying symptoms of the COVID-19 virus. Designed by Yash Gupte, the Aware is the kind of device that sits well in homes, offices, and retail spaces. The two-piece wireless unit is a lot like a cordless phone. With a base that houses an intuitive main interface and a Pulse Oximeter input, and a handheld receiver that works as an infrared thermometer and a control device. Aside from being a convenient go-to device to quickly measure temperature and blood-oxygen levels, the Aware also lets you keep historical records of the readings, comparing them day-to-day. Plus, it works as an alarm too, reminding you to take your daily readings as well as adopt healthy practices like taking medicines, sanitizing your hands, etc. It does all of this while maintaining an appearance that’s simple and non-medical… two design cues that not only make the Aware fit well into homes and office spaces, but they also make getting checked up less scary or daunting!

Designer: Yash Gupte (Wacko Designs)

The Swivel brings elegance and function together to make projectors look cool again!

Close your eyes for a second and think of a projector. Chances are you’ve got the same image in your head as I do. A cuboid-shaped device that’s either black or white in color, suspended from the ceiling, and with a massive lens on one of its faces. It’s safe to say that almost all projectors are designed to look practically the same way. Their purpose isn’t to look good. It’s to sit in the background, while you focus your attention on the image it’s casting. Some would argue that projectors are fine as they are, while others would probably say it’s a category that needs a radical relook. Yash Gupte (better known as his internet moniker Wacko Designs) considers himself to be a part of the second set of people.

The Swivel is Gupte’s answer to the stagnated design language of projectors. It ditches the notion that projectors need to be rectangular, and comes with a unique inverted U-shaped frame, within which sits a circular device. The name Swivel comes from the swiveling action of the main projector unit. Designed to be pointed at any angle (so you could use it as a long-throw or a short-throw projector), the swiveling detail lets you easily adjust the projector to face forwards, downwards, or upwards, with rotational freedom of up to 160°. Circular vents on the back of the projector help with heat-dissipation, while a single knob on the front (in the bottom corner of the frame) lets you toggle through the projector’s functions and tweak its settings. To make this already exciting concept even more fun, the Swivel runs wirelessly (which means you don’t need to worry about HDMI cables and cross-compatibility) and is small/slim enough to fit int backpacks, so you could carry it around to a friend’s house for a movie or game night!

Designer: Yash Gupte (Wacko Designs)

This Rose-Gold and White Gimbal-operated camera stabilizes your videos with style!

We’ve come to really expect rather wonderful concepts from the mind of Yash Gupte, and the Manouvre is surely one of them. Designed as a 3-axis stabilized action-camera made appropriately for influencers and vloggers, the Manouvre sits at the intersection of tech and style. Its body sports a pretty large f3.2 portrait camera lens mounted on a sleek 3-axis arm, ensconced in rose-gold and white.

The Manouvre looks less like a camera and more like a fashion accessory, as it should. Designed for people who want to capture the wondrous world around them, the gimbal-camera looks like a part of the set, rather than a behind-the-scenes gizmo. The gimbal can be operated via a button near the grip, and you can toggle recording on/off using a red button on the camera’s body. The Manouvre even comes with its own circular display on the back, allowing you to cycle through features, get updates on your recording format, and even preview recordings by using the screen as a viewfinder. The lens features a knurled grip, which makes me wonder whether the gimbal camera has manual focus control (sounds like a very interesting feature), but alas, the Manouvre exists only as a concept, so there’s no real way of finding out. I’ve got to say though, the form language and that deadly color-combo is DEFINITELY working in this handheld gimbal-camera’s favor, don’t you think?

Designer: Yash Gupte (Wacko Designs)

This smart-speaker uses a conical chamber to naturally amplify its sound!

The HomePod Mini launched yesterday, and it got me thinking about how most people naturally place their smart-speakers on shelves, cabinets, and mantelpieces that are against a wall. Most smart-speakers utilize a 360° array of drivers to throw audio in all directions – because companies expect you to keep your smartphone in a centrally located position, but that’s a strange assumption to make on the part of a consumer. People keep speakers closer to power-outlets, just like they do with their Wi-Fi routers, so having 360° sound really isn’t a feature as much as it’s an oversight.

The Wacko Designs smart speaker concept builds on the logic that speakers will almost always be kept against a wall or in the corner of a room (closest to a power outlet). Instead of focusing on 360° audio, it uses a more practical method of channeling audio in a conical path. The Wacko Smart Speaker uses a single set of audio drivers, and a megaphone-inspired form to focus the sound-waves forwards rather than scattering them in all directions, amplifying them in the process. The driver unit comes with Mid and High-range tweeters facing forwards, allowing sound to directly travel in 180°, while a bass-radiator on the back channels low-end audio into the conical profile of the speaker, amplifying the bass to make your music richer and louder naturally. Obviously, you can talk to the Wacko smart-speaker using its native voice A.I., but a pretty nifty screen on the front lets you interact with it more naturally, tapping, sliding, and swiping to shuffle through songs, play/pause music, and increase or decrease volume!

Designer: Yash Gupte (Wacko Designs)

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This AR Headset concept ditches the front-heavy design for a uniformly distributed design

Some people would equate the Wacko AR Headset to a halo that sits around your head (I’m one of them). Rather than having a form that is much too influenced by the heavy, toaster-shaped VR headsets we see today, the Wacko AR Headset by Yash Gupte (who goes by the moniker Wacko Designs on social media) is uniformly designed with mass that’s distributed around your head. I imagine this makes the AR headset a whole lot comfortable to wear, a feature that’s only further enforced by the cushions both on the front as well as the back.

Slip it on and switch it on, and the Wacko AR Headset instantly immerses you in a world upgraded by a secondary layer of reality superimposed on the first. Three wide-angle lenses on the front help capture the world in front of you, while the viewfinders on the inside give you a stunning 200° wide viewing angle to truly immerse you. Controls on the side (near the temple) let you power the headset as well as increase or decrease volume, while tapered holes right in front of the controls act as speaker units, playing audio directly into your ear without covering them. Finally, air-intakes on the top (near the forehead) keep the headset cool, while an adjustable cushion on the back gives you a secure fitting while you browse through AR/VR content.

Designer: Yash Gupte (Wacko Designs)