🐯 The Tiger Mom Surveillance State?
Raspberry Pi × PS5 Texture × Hot List
Hey there — its a big day…
Hopefully, this week’s issue of Surface Texture will serve as a short respite from the inevitable onslaught of news today. Perhaps you can read it while waiting in line to vote 😉
Don’t forget to stay safe out there.
— Will @ Surface Texture
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ByteDance | Dali Smart Tutoring Lamp
TikTok parent company, ByteDance, announced the release of it’s first ever hardware product — the Dali Smart Tutoring Lamp. The Dali more or less functions as an advanced baby-monitor targeted toward younger, school-aged children — embedded in the lamp are two webcams, one directly facing the student (located in the smartphone-shaped display at the base of the lamp), and one facing downward, aimed at the student’s homework or task (in the center of the tail fin). The connected lamp allows parents and teachers to remotely keep an eye on their children, popping into a video conference session if a student appears to need help… or discipline.
Skeptics might think this is a new tool of the Tiger Mom surveillance state… but there’s more to it than that.
First, some design details:
The lamp is intended to sit centered in front of you, with light illuminating your worksheet from both the left and the right. This projection method minimizes shadows which could get in the way of someone who’s just learning how to read (e.g. tracing their finger along a string of words) — the same technique is employed on shadowless surgical lights in operating rooms.
It also looks like a whale — which is cute — without looking like an outright toy. An important distinction when you’re selling a tool to parents for use by both kids and adults.
Overall, the Dali’s form-factor is a unique build on Facebook’s video-calling appliance, the Portal+, crossed with the CZUR Aura smart scanner…
Portal : Facebook :: Dali : TikTok
The Dali lamp comes at a time when families are stretched thin, where the divide between work and life is blurred — it’s a weird time to be a kid, and a tough time to be a mother. A cynical view of the Dali lamp might perceive it as a way for helicopter parents to monitor every part of their child’s life, like that one Black Mirror episode. More sensibly, the Dali is a response to the overloaded home, and a lack of digital tools suited to school-age children.
Perhaps the cynicism is warranted when you zoom out — why is ByteDance/TikTok getting into education?
…the next generation of TikTok users are learning how to write.
👁 Worth a Look
The new Raspberry Pi 400 is a computer inside a keyboard — at $70, its a seemingly great option for schools-gone-remote without having to source more expensive Chromebooks, tablets, etc. The back of the keyboard allows access to the 40-pin GPIO headers, which opens up a world of possibilities in STEM education — I could easily imagine a future Raspberry Pi product that breaks these headers out into a breadboard for prototyping circuits. Here’s a great teardown, and the first ASMR launch video?
The PlayStation 5 is nine days away from shipping and the internet is going nuts over the microscopic texture on the controllers. For some reason these types of Easter Eggs are equated with “good design” among brand-loyalists — wow, they even put a secret logo in here!? It is good design though, but not for the matryoshka-doll logo-in-a-logo effect: creating a brand new texture is a huge engineering challenge, especially with this level of crisp detail — the texture is a certificate of authenticity. There are going to be PS5 controller knock-offs, super high quality ones too, but the replicability of this texture is going to be extremely difficult, like a hologram on a $100 bill. The complex texture is Sony’s way of letting customers know their controllers are authentic, kind of like a step down from what Dust does (diamond-powder added to parts as a security measure).
Harley-Davidson’s newly released electric bike, the Serial 1. White tires are a peculiar choice. Favorite found comment: Does it leak oil? 😂
This lyst [sic] of 2020-Q3 “Fashion’s HOTTEST Brands” is an interesting look into a world rarely worth looking into. Fashion is really leaning into the “fashion’s not dead if you’re at home” thing. The Telfar bag, Grateful Dead tie-die crocs, and Adidas face mask are the most intriguing inclusions.