A set of conceptual renderings for a futuristic looking Facebook phone have appeared this week courtesy of designer Tolga Tuncer that are set to delight. This device completely enclosed in a combination of blue plastic and aluminum with the Facebook emblem right up front and center and a "like" thumbs up button down where you'd expect a home button to be. From there it only gets stranger - and perhaps more enticing.
Ever been caught out in the rain without an umbrella? We feel your pain. A Russian designer by the name of Mikhail Belyaev has come up with a cool concept that could solve the problem by using street lamps. Belyaev’s idea would see umbrellas automatically deploying from street lamps when it begins to rain, providing shelter for those looking to avoid getting drenched.
The folks at Sony have revealed that they've been running a set of workshops this yeah that all surround a better and brighter future under the title FutureScapes. This project is a collaboration between Sony and Forum for the Future and is bringing together futurologists, thinkers, authors, technologists, sustainability experts, and vloggers, not to mention the public - to imagine the future world of 2025, and they've created a short video presentation to make it all clear.
Want to see a new concept car that looks extremely cool? Of course you do. Renault has officially unveiled the Alpine A110-50 concept car at the Monaco Grand Prix. Renault reportedly didn’t want to design a retro looking car and has instead taken some design cues from the Renault DeZir first seen in 2010. The car will house a 24-valve V6 engine underneath the hood which is capable of producing 400 horsepower and 311 foot pounds of torque.
The buzz last week that iconic designer Philippe Starck was working on a "revolutionary" project for Apple was quickly shot down by the Cupertino company and now the designer himself has issued a statement confirming the same. Starck is indeed working on a design project for the late Steve Jobs' family, but it's a personal project that involves Jobs' private yacht and not a next-gen product for Apple.
Today our dreams for a Philippe Starck-designed Apple product have been quickly dashed by none other than Apple themselves in a simple statement. Speaking with John Paczkowski of All Things D, an Apple spokeswoman said simply that they are not working with Starck on a project at all. On the other hand, it has been revealed (or remembered, rather) that Steve Jobs was indeed working with Starck before he died on a project that very well could have been what Starck was referring to, in a sense.
There's nothing better than when a brilliant industrial designer like Philippe Starck gets the opportunity to design for a massively powerful manufacturer like Apple. This week we're hearing from Starck via a French radio show that he's worked with Apple for several years on a project which will be released this summer - a "revolutionary" product at that. What we're doing now is combing through the Starck archives to see if we can glean some information and put together some puzzle pieces that equal out to be what Apple may have helped this man bring to the world this year.
There are now two Portal games out there in the wild, both of them created with Valve ultimately simple concept of a factory testing technology on you, the player - but that's not all the writers on the team had in mind at one point or another. As all games begin with an idea, so too did Portal 2 begin with a notion that even though Portal could exist as a one-off game, it certainly didn't need to. Speaking up this week at an event in San Francisco, Valve writers Chet Faliszek and Erik Wolpaw spoke on how iterations of the game Portal 2 existed in which there were no portals, no character Chell, and no GLaDOS factory at all - a maddening set of realities indeed!
This week at the games portal the world knows best as a comic, Penny Arcade, Valve's own Gabe Newell spoke on many things in an interview, perhaps most interestingly of all on experiments he's been doing with wearable computers. It's not that long ago, he noted, that what was called the "wearable computer" was a growing industry, or at least a possibility for a market sometime in the future. Since those days, whenever those days may have been, law suits were filed for exploding computer body suits, nothing solid ended up really coming together during the popularity wave of the wearable computer, and they all but fizzled out - but they still exist, he insists, and they're about to be better than they ever were before.
What we're about to experience is a closer look at the top five posts purely by popularity here on SlashGear inside the year 2011. That's twelve months of the mobile explosion, the Apple vs Google war, and the launch of some pretty fantastic products and strange stories. What you'll notice right out of the gate is that Apple held just as strong a hold on the web as it did on the market, with the top two stories being some undeniably surprising shots out of the dark. Are you ready for the winners?
HP's identity could certainly use a makeover and apparently the company has been actively looking into making some changes during the past few years. Moving Brands, a company specializing in branding, was hired back in 2008 to re-envision HP's image and has come up with something that was apparently too radical for HP's tastes. The branding company has recently made the project available for the public to take a look, including rendered images and videos.
Honda has unveiled its futuristic-looking electric concept roadster called the EV-STER just a few days ahead of the 2011 Tokyo Motor Show set to take place from December 3 through December 11. We've seen some very Tron-inspired renderings of the vehicle earlier this month, but now we get photos of the real thing along with a few more details on the specs.