Robots: they took’r jerbs! Or at least, drones stood in for live models at Dolce & Gabbana’s runway during Milan fashion week, floating handbags above the heads of awed onlookers. The series of seven bags, entitled ‘Devotion,’ debuted during the ‘Secrets & Diamonds’ evening wear event. The drones looked like tiny helicopters topped by dim lightbulbs, buzzing through the room like oversized insects while handlers in white lab coats hovered nearby in case of a problem.

But the show went off without a hitch, and models didn’t lose their jobs after all, streaming in behind the drones to showcase the design house’s collection of Autumn/Winter 2018 garments. Or at least, we think they were human. Humanoid robots haven’t quite achieved this level of realistic detail just yet.

The drone show by Dolce & Gabbana comes just days after Gucci shocked audiences with some of their most avant-garde accessories yet: severed heads. In a space designed to look like an operating room at a hospital, models sauntered down the runway holding replicas of their own noggins, or in other cases lizards, snakes and even a baby dragon. What does it mean? Who knows, but at least the clothes were beautiful.

If you don’t capture every minute detail of your life and post it on social media and proceed to buy likes from Buzzoid, did it even happen? That’s one question that comes to mind when you first get a look at the RokShok – a new, highly Instagrammable way to propose to your partner. This (hopefully) one-time-use $40 smartphone case puts the engagement ring you’ve purchased on a pedestal right in front of your phone’s camera so you can capture whatever facial expressions pass over his or her face. Ah, just the ring presentation we’ve all dreamed of since we were kids, huh?

With roughly the profile of a phone case with a built-in backup battery, the RokShok is relatively incognito until you get to your chosen location, drop down on your knee and flip the case open to reveal the ring you’ve mounted inside. Then, both the ring and the subject of your proposal are right in the frame for a point-of-view shot of the action. Hopefully you won’t accidentally trigger it to open at the wrong moment, like when you’re walking over a sewer grate.

Once you propose, you’ll either have a memory you and your future spouse will want to look fondly on for years to come (and post all over Facebook at every opportunity, along with your future baby photos, meals, vacations and blurry sunsets) or a spectacularly masochistic play-by-play of the moment your heart was broken. Just be sure to give your special friend a moment to recover from their confusion about this phone-centric proposal before you make assumptions, start crying and throw the ring into an adjacent body of water.

Clearly, this kind of proposal isn’t for everyone. Not all of us want technology inserted prominently into our most special moments. But for others, it’s a cool way to document a life event that can be all too fleeting. It’s available for preorder on the RokShok website.

If you could build an origami-like paper object that can visualize information at your voice command, what would you ask it to tell you? Google’s new ‘Paper Signals’ project is a fun way to play with information, technology and DIY crafts, offering templates for paper sculptures containing simple parts like a micro servo, an Adafruit Feather Huzzah (a thin, light WiFi board with built-in USB and battery charging) and some things you likely have laying around the house or office.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iJXYSfnxuQ

Google’s examples are an arrow that points up and down to track Bitcoin, a wheel that counts down to Halloween, an umbrella that tracks the rain in Seattle, a pair of pants that grows shorter or longer according to the temperature in New York City, a box with arms that tells you when it’s time to take a break and a rocket that tracks NASA launches.

You can choose from one of these examples and print the paper template to put it together using your own parts, or buy the Paper Signals bundle from Adafruit for $24.95. Or, if you have some experience, grab the code from GitHub and make something new.

If you’re sober, pregnant or otherwise unable or unwilling to consume alcohol, you can still enjoy whatever cocktails you crave with a high-tech drinking glass that simulates three layers of senses to trick you into tasting flavors that aren’t really there. Invented by Nimesha Ranasinghe, the ‘Vocktail’ or ‘virtual cocktail’ glass can either augment the ingredients of your choice to make your real cocktail more complex, or make a glass of plain water taste like expensive scotch.

The first ‘layer’ of sensory simulation is the color cast onto the liquid by LED lights, giving our brains an idea of what to expect from the flavor. The second is tiny pumps of scent located along the rim, spraying these all-important molecules right in front of our noses. But the third, and most impressive, is a series of electrodes that send signals to the tongue, altering the flavor of what we think we’re tasting.

The glass is interesting (and potentially game-changing) in and of itself, but consider how technology like this could dramatically alter our experience of the internet and virtual reality. As part of his research work at the National University of Singapore, Ranasinghe also developed TasteXML, a markup language for flavor, as well as Taste Over IP, a protocol for transmitting flavors over the internet.

The inventor describes the latter creation thusly:

“Taste Over IP (Taste/IP) is a new methodology (framework) for integrating the sensation of taste with the existing digital communication domain. Taste/IP has three core modules: the transmitter, form of communication, and receiver. The transmitter is an AndroidTM mobile application, where the sender formulates a taste message to send. At present, we are conducting research on transferring basic taste sensations known as sour, salty, bitter, and sweet.”

“Then, for communication, we present a new extensible markup language (XML) format, the TasteXML (TXML) to specify the format of taste messages. TasteXML is a Remote Procedure Calling protocol that works over the Internet. TasteXML messages are set of encrypted requests and responses. The body of both request and response are in XML format. As the receiver (actuator), we use the Digital Taste Interface, a novel method for stimulating taste sensations on human.
We believe, in the future, this technology may use to implement digital taste sharing platforms and social networking services.”

Can you think of an iconic electronic object for every letter of the alphabet? A for Apple, B for Bose, C for Canon, D for Dell and so on, all the way to Z? Graphic designer Vinicius Araujo found the most obvious (and satisfying) answer for all 26 letters and crafted them into renderings of appropriately shaped electronics. The series, which he calls ‘36days Electronics,’ is based on the Helvetica typeface.

For Apple, there’s a classic Macintosh computer with a floppy disk drive; Bose looks like a speaker; Epson is a printer; Motorola is the most ancient of cell phones; Sony’s a Walkman.

Functionality isn’t the point here – a computer monitor shaped like a D obviously isn’t going to do you much good. But it’s a fun visual exercise that will likely spur some nostalgia for the technology days of yore – or perhaps gratitude that our gadgets have evolved.

See more photos at Vinicius Araujo’s Behance portfolio.