Surface Texture - Issue 38
🐍 Clean Constrictor Management | 💼 Silkworm Pods for VR | 😴 Diet Sleep
Welcome to Surface Texture, the weekly newsletter covering product design trends and innovations for hardware designers, engineers, strategists, and entrepreneurs.
The products of Surface Texture, Issue 38:
🐍 Google released the Meet Series One, a meeting room kit betting on an eventual return to the office with some clean cable-management features
💼 Oculus unveiled V2 of their Quest all-in-one VR headset, including accessories that embody the headset’s small form-factor
😴 PepsiCo announced a new sleeping-aid beverage called Driftwell
Google Meet Series One Meeting Room Kit
This week, Google announced their Series One meeting room kit, a series of modular video conferencing components from a bevy of partners like Huddly (smart cameras) and Lenovo. The hardware is meant to amp-up Google’s business video-conferencing app, Google Meet, in anticipation of an eventual return to meeting in shared conference rooms. Meanwhile, we’re seeing companies like Zoom partner with DTEN to create personal workspaces for home office users, start-ups like Sidekick offering “always on” video-conferencing solutions to keep distributed teams (hyper) connected, and Facebook’s Portal devices now support a wide range of video-conferencing platforms (e.g. Zoom, BlueJeans, WebEx).
Arguably, it’s not a great time to be launching a conference room hardware product, but there is some latent upside — consumer expectations around video conferencing are much higher than the before-times. What was once “good enough” in meeting room IT (e.g. one microphone for an entire conference room) may need an upgrade as workers, now having lived-experience of the highs and lows of work-related video calls, return to the office. It seems like a safe bet that more executives will be upgrading these types of systems after living a much smoother video-conferencing lifestyle at home. The Series One is getting ahead of people realizing their meeting rooms suck — goodbye swiss-army knife HDMI adapters and sticky notes with meeting room credentials.
The Series One has all the standard components you’d expect to be part of a modular “meeting room kit” — a hub, soundbar, video cameras, and microphones — but it really takes pride in it’s ease of installation and cable-management. The ends of the cables are sensibly color-coded, and small cavities underneath the individual devices allow storage of a service-loop length of cable (if you know exactly where you want the touchscreen hub to be on the conference table, there’s room to push excess cable inside the cavity). Finally, the cavity functions as a strain gauge to enhance the longevity of the cable — important when someone yanks on the microphone cord to bring it closer. All of the individual devices (excluding the “compute” hub) receive power over ethernet (PoE); as such, they only require one connection and can easily daisy chain for future expansion. Some of these are fairly standard features in this space, but it’s sure difficult to find anyone highlighting them in their product photography.
Overall, the Series One is early to the race to re-envision the tech in our communal work spaces, and designing for easy installation and future flexibility/modularity is a safe approach that will make customers happy.
Oculus Quest 2 | Link Cable + Carrying Case
Last Wednesday, Oculus unveiled V2 of their Quest all-in-one VR headset, the Quest 2. The original Quest was quite popular given its considerably lower profile relative to “traditional” VR headsets requiring a lot of set-up and tether to a high-performance PC — the Quest afforded a high level of freedom, with integrated compute/power/position-tracking all inside the headset. With the Quest 2, now $100 cheaper than it’s predecessor, the barrier to entry of decent virtual reality experiences is lower than ever. This all does come at a cost, like the Quest 2 requiring a Facebook account to use the device… this review weighs the pros and cons.
From a hardware perspective, the Quest 2 is not much different from the original Quest. It’s a little smaller, adds some ergonomic improvements, and is now only available in white (the CMF is somewhat reminiscent of Google’s Daydream View headset), which is a divergence from Oculus’ traditional all-black product line.
One new feature is the ability to tether the headset to a PC, similar to “traditional” headsets like the Oculus Rift, for more performance-intensive VR environments. This was something available with the Quest, but the integration appeared more as an afterthought. The new Oculus Link cable is much more intentional, routing the cable to an area away from where you’ll be flailing your arms in space.
A peculiarity of VR headset ownership is the need for a carrying case and storing the thing. Oculus’ silkworm-pod inspired carrying case neatly packs away the Quest 2, with subtle branding suggestive of the care the design team placed on the entire product, from how it would be used to how it would be stored.
Pepsi Driftwell
This is a bit meta, but something Surface Texture grapples with when determining new products to discuss every week…
Is a new type of food a hardware product??
It’s a funny distinction, thinking of food as hardware. Usually, hardware is defined as a kind of durable good or tool — maybe food is like a temporary durable good. This all may sound like a shower thought, but the “hardware-i-ness” of anything we report on is something that goes into each week’s issue — last week, we almost talked about the hyped “Travis Scott Meal” and associated merchandising models (fortunately, NY Times critic Jon Caramanica wrote the article we wanted to write). In sum, we won’t always write about textbook-definition hardware, oftentimes pulling from industries that signal a trend underrepresented in traditional hardware fields. This week, we’re pulling from Big Soda.
Without further ado, Driftwell — the new sleeping aid beverage by Pepsi [photo credit Fast Company].
The anti-coffee. From Food Dive:
PepsiCo is launching a functional water called Driftwell aimed at combating stress and inducing relaxation, according to an emailed release. The enhanced water contains 200 grams of L-theanine, an amino acid found in tea and some herbal mushrooms, and 10% of the daily value of magnesium.
Finally, a functional water — joking aside, it makes sense for Pepsi to look towards healthier beverages while more and more consumers adopt health-conscious lifestyles (see the major fitness focused product releases in last week’s issue), as well as more permanent outright bans of sugary drinks and snacks in states like Oaxaca, MX.
But its not just healthier beverages, it’s beverages with a secondary purpose, in Driftwell’s case, to promote relaxation and falling asleep. Is this a reaction to a stressed out population that can’t relax or fall asleep? Or perhaps, a sign of normalizing the “functionalization” of our food (see Joe Rogan’s evangelism for mushroom coffee)?
Sleep quality has been in the public eye for quite some time now, with companies like Casper becoming a household name and Apple prioritizing sleep tracking in their recent Series 6 launch. But for a company like PepsiCo to enter the “sleep space” is unique and perhaps a bellwether for more entrants from seemingly unrelated industries.
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