Surface Texture - Issue 39
💍 Home Drone | 🆔 VW ID | 👔 Personal Shopper
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 39:
💍 Ring debuted the Always Home Cam — a flying security drone that can independently patrol your domain…
🆔 Volkswagen finally revealed the production ID.4, their first all-electric SUV in the US, with a focus on affordability.
👔 Amazon announced Personal Shopper by Prime Wardrobe, a new subscription service that does your apparel shopping, and styling, for you.
Ring Always Home Cam
Ring released a slew of new surveillance devices last week, from car cameras that monitor the safety of your vehicle when parked to a mailbox sensor that sends you a notification every time your mailbox is opened. The announcement with the most media buzz was the Always Home Cam, an autonomous indoor drone intended to scare away clumsy thieves (as illustrated in the promo video). The launch is receiving a lot of skepticism for a number of valid reasons (outlined here), chief among them — do people really need full surveillance of their homes?
Ring suggests the drone could be used not only to “scare” away intruders (Wouldn’t you just knock this thing to the ground?), but also to give you peace of mind that you remembered to close that upstairs window, or confirm you turned off the iron before leaving the house (not that you could do anything about it from the Ring app).
To be blunt, this is technology searching for a problem — the ramifications are far-reaching. First, the hardware:
While the use-cases are dubious, the concept execution is excellent. A small “home base” serves as the drone’s recharging station, which features a central pocket to properly register the drone. The pocket has a large opening to allow some error in the overhead positioning — the drone simply needs to be “in the area” of the pocket when descending, where the gradual taper will perfectly register the drone on top of the base (the symmetry of the design allows the drone to dock in any orientation). Since the drone is technically a prototype, we’re light on all the sensor details, but we’re guessing the puck on top is some kind of LIDAR sensor to determine room position and avoid obstacles (there’s probably some other downward facing camera or distance sensor in the “T” to determine “altitude.”
The ramifications —
Who’s driving our perception of home robotics? Our current expectations align home robots with appliances, with our primary reference point being the autonomous vacuuming Roomba, and Ring leans into that with some influence from consumer electronics. We’re at an inflection point where people still think about robots as these futuristic entities, pulled from science fiction and not-quite-ready for co-habitation. But the Always Home Cam is a noticeable jump forward in agency, 3D flying vs. 2D driving, compared to something like a Roomba. There aren’t many products that fly around us… will a product like this normalize much more robot “freedoms?” It seems likely that a growing population of robots would all have some sort of integrated camera — how will we ensure privacy in a robotic future? For now, Ring marketing assures us our privacy…
We even designed Always Home Cam to hum at a certain volume, so it’s clear the camera is in motion and is recording. This is privacy you can hear.
Doesn’t the drone have an uncanny resemblance to HAL 9000?
Volkswagen ID.4
VW unveiled the production ID.4 this week, their first all-electric SUV in the US, officially launching at the end of this year. As part of Volkswagen’s mission to go all electric by 2026 (and diesel-gate penance), the ID.4 is competitively positioned to capture some of the high market demand for electric SUVs, with few other competitors at the $40k price-point.
The ID.4 leverages Volkswagen’s MEB (Modular Electric Drive Matrix), an effort to standardize chassis/powertrain/battery to serve as a platform for future electric vehicles, including future ID variations, while massively cutting costs. VW is shopping the platform to other automakers (like Ford), while celebrating the cost-saving success of the ID.3 —
“If you focus on an electric platform, all in all it accounts for a 40% reduction against the predecessor electric Golf. Most of it from cells and the battery system. Around 5-10% comes from dedicating an entire plant to electric vehicles.”
The interior is quite pared down, with the driver display shrunk to it’s absolute smallest. We wonder if we’ll eventually see this display disappear, relocating the functionality to a center console display.
While the exterior is par for the course, VW emphasized the importance of light as signaling a new design direction —
Personal Shopper by Prime Wardrobe
A burgeoning luxury is paying people to buy stuff for you. It’s not unusual to pay people to buy specific things and deliver them to you (e.g. Instacart, etc.). Nor is it unusual to pay people to curate products and have them sent to you (e.g. Birchbox — monthly beauty and grooming boxes). But now, Amazon is entering the “pay us to tell you what to buy” market, or the Styling Service industry, starting with fashion in Personal Shopper.
Briefly, Personal Shopper is a subscription service that send you a few sets of clothing via Amazon Prime every once in awhile. You keep what you like, return what you don’t, and get refunded for everything you return. The service, not unlike Thread, curates these clothing options based on what’s currently fashionable or your tastes.
What’s compelling about Personal Shopper isn’t so much the fashion angle, but thinking about the possibilities expanded to the entire Amazon ecosystem. Amazon has massive amounts of data on the best products in any given category, and many of it’s users simply want the best X when making a purchasing decision (interchange “best” with “fashionable,” “cheapest,” “value,” etc.). Companies like Wirecutter are prospering collecting affiliate revenue by making these recommendations for it’s readers. Personal Shopper has the potential to absorb this type of customer and cut out the “due diligence” (reading reviews), a pain point for many customers, and simply making the call for them (who needs choice when you’re choosing “fashionable?”).
Taking a further step back, Amazon’s scale has the potential to set fashion with something like Personal Shopper.
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