Surface Texture - Issue 36
🤲 A really nice hinge | 📈 performance on the outside | 🏎 Dalí meets Mario
Welcome to Surface Texture, the weekly newsletter covering product design trends and innovations for hardware designers, engineers, strategists, and entrepreneurs.
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The products of Surface Texture, Issue 36:
🤲 Microsoft’s foldable smartphone, the Duo, begins shipping this week and the hinge is spectacular
📈 NVIDIA announced a new line of GPUs with stand-alone aesthetics
🏎 Nintendo celebrates Mario’s 35th birthday with an augmented reality version of Mario Kart
Microsoft Duo Hinge
About a year ago, Microsoft announced they were working on a foldable phone called the Duo — this week, the phone is officially shipping, and the star of the show is the hinge. Marques Brownlee’s summarized his video review of the hardware in one line:
“The greatest hinge I’ve ever hinged.”
The video is worth watching to get a feel for how the Duo works and how the hinge makes it all happen.
The Duo is really two smartphones fastened together via a hinge on the top and bottom of the device, but the hinge does so much more than keep both “halves“ rigidly connected — it allows damped, 360° rotation in addition to cleanly routing the cable through the hub of the pivots (some folks have given the Duo a teardown already, showing how the cable is routed). These features are incredibly difficult to design into a hinge, let alone a hinge so small — in order for the Duo to lie completely flat, the thickness of the hinge is less than the phone thickness, which is already super thin at 4.8mm (for reference, an iPhone 11 Pro Max is 8.1mm thick)!
Samsung announced their Galaxy Z Fold2 a couple of weeks ago, and it’s interesting to compare and contrast each companies’ approach to a folding smartphone. Samsung is folding everything, including the touchscreen, to create a phone in the folded position and a tablet in the unfolded position. Microsoft is tightly linking two smartphones, accepting the “crease,” but allowing the device to open to any degree due to the hinge dampening. Part of the trade-off is excluding a top-of-the-line camera and an associated “camera bump,” which is necessary to allow the device to lie completely flat in tablet mode in addition to folding back on itself (the front-facing camera can be made “external” by rotating the Duo so that both screens are facing outward).
It’s not the first time Microsoft has proven itself as a hinge innovator — both the Surface Studio and the Surface Book have complex mechanisms with high-precision components — the Duo is offloading technical complexity to a mechanical component the Surface team has experience with. The market for a folding smartphone is not established, and this approach allows Microsoft to test the waters instead of going all-in on a complex foldable display solution, like Samsung’s Z Fold2.
Apple is rumored to announce the iPhone 12 in the coming weeks — will it fold (probably not)?
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3000 Series GPU
This week, CEO Jensen Huang introduced NVIDIA’s newest line of GPUs from the comfort of his kitchen, the GeForce RTX 3000 Series. In terms of performance, the RTX 3000 cards are a huge leap forward, but it’s inclusion in this week’s Surface Texture is due to it’s appearance. More specifically, the growing productization of components in the computer hardware market. As part of the product intro, NVIDA played this video showcasing the changes of NVIDA GPUs over time. What was once a plain circuit board evolved into a Transformers-like enclosure (GTX 1080), and now to the more premium RTX 3000 below.
Maybe it’s the leather jacket Jensen Huang was wearing during the launch event, but the GPU looks partially inspired by an air-cooled motorcycle engine. Unintentionally, an ode to the PS2?
The GPU is turning into the premier component of any custom built PC, oftentimes with PC cases having glass side panels to show off all of the expensive components composing the assembly. Products like NVIDIA’s RTX 3000 GPUs need a certain level of aesthetic consideration considering their high overall cost and prominence in PC builds. The GPU today is what the V8 engine was to high-school kids with muscle cars in the 70s.
Mario Kart Home Circuit
To celebrate Mario’s 35th birthday, Nintendo announced a lineup of new games and remastered versions of Mario classics. Included in the lineup is a new tech-savvy riff on Mario Kart integrating augmented reality and machine vision with drone-like first-person view (FPV) controls. The racers play by connecting their Nintendo Switch to a motorized remote-controlled cart, using the video game controller to drive the RC carts around a track built in your home. From the driver’s perspective, video game mechanics (banana peels, speed boosts, etc.) are overlaid on the game screen which is displaying a live feed of the cart’s view. It’s tricky to wrap your head around the mechanics, this video does it best.
The graphic design of the Home Circuit packaging is fascinating, due to the difficulty of rendering the concept of an AR toy without the “digital overlay” — we see the perspective of the gamer (sitting on the couch) through him/her playing the game itself (lower left hand corner), which is also the shared perspective of Luigi in his green cart. It’s an AR mise en abyme, or more like this Dalí painting, replacing “Painting Gala” with “Driving Luigi” — Dalí Seen from the Back Painting Gala from the Back Eternalized by Six Virtual Corneas Provisionally Reflected by Six Real Mirrors.
Without digging too far into the metaphysics of Mario Kart Home Circuit, the toy as a hardware product is innovative in a technology-as-toy sense. Most of the product photography shows relatively small courses designed to be played out in a single room, but the idea of massive tracks where you lose line of sight of the cart and are dependent on FPV controls (like some modern drones) is very cool for a kid — it taps into the same kind of feeling you get using Walkie Talkies or other spy gear, the “[we] kids shouldn’t be allowed to have this technology!” feeling.
PS — A few notes this week:
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