This is Daniel. Together with Matt and a growing band of travellers, we are building Inanimate - a consumer electronics company for the AI Era. 

This is Lab Notes, where we share our work and inspirations.

Here’s what’s happening in The Lab.

We are about to start flooding the feeds with video content.

The primary channel will be Instagram. Follow us to keep up with the story.

Concerned I am bumbling into a sticker turf war with sticker “slappers” across London and New York. I need to watch my back.

Here’s what’s been influencing and inspiring me this week.

Lamps are a design classic. We like lamps here at Inanimate. And so do many New Wave Hardware builders. 

There is Autonomous, PlaiPin, Nightingale01, Le Lamp, and Ongo. Some are open source, some are characterful, some walk, all of them move.

Irvin - a nice robotics researcher on X - has created a potted history of Robot Lamps that stretches back to 2005 and has identified 30! Read the piece here.

My first car (well, my parents car) was a Toyota Corolla - the world’s best selling car. That was written off three months after I passed my driving test. So my parents bought a new car. It was a Toyota Corolla. Two decades later, on choosing the first car for my own family, I researched deeply, and decided to buy… a Toyota Corolla. Your parents are your destiny.

Corolla’s are really easy to drive. They are, however, a bit boring. Especially the 1990s models. The most boring part about them? The head unit (AKA the car stereo). A dull colourless LCD screen, with no backlight, held together by a tragically sad piece of mechanically controlled black plastic. 

Back then, this could be easily remedied with a trip to British retail park institution Halfords - purveyors of family bicycles, car batteries, air fresheners, and various garage dwelling tools. When cars were still just about fixable at home, a trip to Halfords was a semi-regular experience. And Halfords had a head unit demonstration section, which to my young eyes was a showcase of the very frontier of Japanese technology. 

Six brands dominated the market - Technics, Kenwood, Aiwa, Alpine, Sony, and Pioneer. 

In the 1990s, it felt like every week saw new advances in head unit technology. CD players, multi-disc changers, motorised display arms, Mini-Discs (oh, the MiniDisc!), hundreds of presets, graphic equalisers, and more. There was fierce competition in the market on features and price. But what really set each head unit apart for me was the display tech and the wild demo graphics used to show it off. King among them - the Pioneer dolphin display (emulator here).

Skip forward to the present, and Japanese electronics brands have retreated from the cutting edge of  consumer devices. With that we have lost the many aspects of Japanese culture that inflected their products. Shinto tradition, hand drawn animation, cuteness as dogma, and the idea that inanimate objects can be alive. Inspiration does not come from one place, but from everywhere. And I put it to you, that it is a bold creative act for a business to invest so much time and money into a graphic of swimming dolphins as good as this. A pioneer, indeed.

Now, I am no expert on the specifics of display tech history. But this moment that Pioneer led was the beginning of mass market adoption of OEL display tech, now commonly called OLEDs. This is the same display tech found in all the devices that run our lives - computers, TVs, smartphones, and more. Bright whites, pitch blacks, and over a billion colours.

Before OLEDs went mainstream, there was a proliferation of different types of display tech finding its way into cars. Segment displays of the 80s looked great, but were difficult to maintain. LCD character displays were cheap, but dull and uninspiring. VFDs (Vacuum Fluorescent Displays), an ancient technology, but were monochromatic and so fell early in the fight.

But VFDs are awesome! They are fully programmable and with a high refresh rate, meaning they could handle complex graphics, animations, and allow deep menu architectures. They are still in use today, most commonly at supermarket checkouts.

When everything is the same, seeing something different can be quite special. It’s why in a world of OLEDs, people love eInk screens. Well, wait until you see a VFD IRL! They glow with an atomic brightness, almost always neon blue or cyberpunk green. The screens of late-80s Hollywood sci-fi, the computer panels in Japanese futurist visions, they feel VFD.

There are many good reasons not to build a hardware company. But when you speak to hardware founders, those that have chosen the hard path, these good reasons are shattered by something more personal, and more powerful. Stories like mine emerge.

Lost memories of soldering with their father. Excitement as they unwrap a games console at Christmas. Friendships forged at a local gaming cafe. Hardware founders - like me - have a deep belief, absorbed through popular culture, that the future would look and feel different to the present, and that it would be glorious. And perhaps a desire, when that future appears under threat and unlikely to emerge, to roll your sleeves up, and bend reality towards the future you were promised.

So yeah - I see Pioneer dolphins on the Vacuum Fluorescent Display.

See you in September.

Daniel