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Samsung is exploring a smart contact lens concept that puts an embedded display and camera right in front of users’ eyeballs. A patent filing from the South Korean company spotted by SamMobile details how such a device could be used to provide an augmented reality view of the world. It would be powered by a wireless connection to a user’s smartphone, and come with an embedded motion sensor to allow blink controls. The patent references Google Glass, but says that such external displays offer poor viewing angles and image quality. These problems could be solved, says the patent, by sandwiching a tiny OLED display between soft contact lens layers.

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HP is launching a global brand offensive today with the ultra-thin Spectre 13 laptop, and one of the subtler changes the company is making is to its logo. Where last year’s Spectre x360 had the full “Hewlett-Packard” written out, the new 13-inch model has just four minimalist slashes making up the “HP” wordmark.

This very same mark first surfaced online in a 2011 brand redesign study released by Moving Brands, who HP had hired to develop a new logo and brand identity. The American tech giant ultimately decided against adopting the aggressively styled logo that had been proposed, much to our disappointment. But now that it has split into two — and having delivered an impressively staid logo for its enterprise entity —…

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Google today unveiled revamped app icons for its family of Play apps to bring each one in line with the company’s more colorful flat design aesthetic. There have been separate apps for services like Play Music and Play Books for about four years now. But the way those apps are discovered in mobile stores can be a bit muddled now that Google has updated and iterated on its design language countless times across its myriad product lines.

The old icons, which you can still check out now in the Play Store or iOS App Store, look especially stale when compared with Google’s more modern sans-serif logo it revealed last fall. So the new consistency will be a welcome change. Google says the updates will be going out in the next couple of weeks.

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Game hardware maker Analogue has made a name for itself selling the Nt, an exorbitantly expensive and beautiful version of a classic NES system. And yet somehow, the company found a way to outdo itself. To commemorate the 30th anniversary of The Legend of Zelda franchise, Analogue is selling ten limited edition Nt units plated with 24-karat gold.

At $5,000, the system is 10 times as expensive as its aluminum-encased predecessor, and about as many times more gorgeous. Each one comes with a gold-colored cartridge of the original 1986 Zelda game that kicked off the series.

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Few countries are as synonymous with smoking as France, where cigarettes like Gauloises and Gitanes are as much a part of the cultural fabric as croissants and labor strikes. But cigarettes sold in the country will have a different face very soon, thanks to a new law that will strip them of all their branding.

Last week, the French Health Ministry announced that all tobacco shops will have to sell cigarettes in plain, logo-free packaging by the end of this year, under a law that was passed at the end of 2015. The brand of each company will be displayed in small, uniform typeface on all packs, which will be manufactured in the same shade of dark green. (Graphic health warnings will be larger, as well.) When the law goes into effect,…

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Apple’s new headquarters is no simple office building. Yes, it looks like a UFO. And, yes, it is estimated to cost close to $5 billion dollars. But it is shaping up impressively ahead of its planned late 2016 or early 2017 completion date. Just a few months ago, the buildings appeared to be in little more than their primordial stage. Now, the latest aerial drone video of the Cupertino, CA, campus shows that glass and solar panels are starting to be put in place, and buildings look to be topped off. There’s even a new peek at the auditorium where future Apple events may be held. Say what you will about Apple (and this extravagant office building), but this will truly be something to behold when it’s complete.

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Josan Gonzalez’s future is the kind of dystopia you want to hang out in.

The Spanish illustrator is currently in the midst of crowdfunding a second book in his series, The Future is Now, and it’s the kind of grimy cyberpunk world where everyone seems to feature some kind of robotic augmentation and the only real escape is to slip on a retro-futuristic VR headset. But it’s also light and playful in a way most dystopias aren’t. “It’s a satire,” he says, “so it’s not about schooling people about ‘Hey, this is wrong.’”

In addition to his own self-published books, Gonzalez has also worked in comics for companies like Boom Studios and Dark Horse, and illustrated a few magazine covers, but, unlike many artists, he says it’s not necessarily…

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Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid passed away this morning at age 65, after a truly groundbreaking career. Hadid was the first woman architect to win the field’s highest award, the Pritzker Prize in 2004, and in 2015, she became the first woman architect to be receive the Royal Institute of British Architects Gold Medal. Beyond all of these honors, Hadid’s legacy will moreover live on in her bold, eye-popping works.

From Hadid’s very first gig, the striking concrete Vitra fire Station completed in 1993, to the gorgeously curvaceous Heydar Aliyev Cultural Centre completed in 2012 — plus some impressive stations and bridges in between — Hadid’s designs dared us to imagine and then see that a sensationally otherworldly architecture can…

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LG’s R&D campus in Seocho, on the southern edge of Seoul, is not the easiest place to get to. After multiple taxi drivers told me on a cold March morning that it was impossible to take me there from the nearest train station, I ended up walking along highways and side streets for 40 minutes before spotting the tall, glassy building with LG’s familiar pink logo. It’s a good thing I happen to like crisp morning air.

It’s also probably good for LG that its biggest secrets are hard for inquiring journalists to stumble upon. But I had a reason to be there — I wanted to hear the story behind the G5, the company’s latest flagship phone and the talk of Mobile World Congress with its unorthodox modular design.

Fortunately, G5 senior designer…

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We’ve seen plenty of heads-up displays for cars that put smartphone notifications on your windshield, but not so many for motorbikes and scooters. Well, the Italian subsidiaries of Samsung and Yamaha have teamed up to create exactly that, with their new smart windshield concept placing text, calls, speed information, directions, and more, right in front of the rider. It’s not clear exactly how the display works, but it appears to be some sort of projector component installed in the base of an ordinary windshield. We should note again that this is a concept and not for sale — Samsung has done similar things before, such as making trucks “transparent" in the name of road safety.

Safer than taking your phone out while riding

Is this a…

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