Black Diamond | Ken Ouyang, CKIE

Look around your room, is it missing some colors?

 

Black Diamond is a gorgeous 3D interactive mood lighting iPhone Dock. The free Black Diamond app on your iPhone, mounted in its dock, can deliver 5 different color schemes that will resurrect the semi-transparent black dome to blush with mesmerizing colors.

More importantly, Black Diamond is also a creative platform where we encourage and invite users to imagine and create applications for it to make it even more interactive. We’ve dreamed up different ways to make it social by utilizing the different colors and patterns the Black Diamond is able to deliver with its 3D presentation. Imagine all the color games you can create. A Russian Roulette drinking game with the Black Diamond anybody?

The point here is beauty and interaction combined.

Saving the world a desk at a time

Before we had anything, our team wanted to create something that would reinvent the iPhone dock to become more interesting. We felt that we took for granted many of the everyday things that we use daily in our lives. Most things can be improved and done better, especially ones as simple and boring as the stock iPhone dock that doesn’t rock. We realized that since so many people own an iPhone, most of them must have iPhone docks. And since everyone has an iPhone dock, they must all have a very boring white blocky thingy that sits on their desks, testing aesthetic patience. Therefore, we decided to combine utility, aesthetics, elegance, and interaction into 1 magical piece of art to stop their desks from committing everyday monotony.

Features:

• Easy to place in and charge for iPhone/iPod touch
• Charged and synchronized with iTunes by mini USB
• Mutiple dynamic effect options (support for Voice Control)
• Set colors of messages from freinds
• Support for iPod music playback
• Progressive Wake Up Function
• Sleep function

Get to Know the band of color robbers

The design was made by Ken Ouyang, who is an electrical engineer turned designer. During an uncontrollable brainstorm, he got his inspiration by placing his iPhone into a jar with a foggy surface that was able to trap colors from escaping into the wild (All the clear jars were bad at keeping prisoners). Therefore, he finalized on the foggy and mystical dome surface because it was the only way to imprison the naughy colors trying to escape and then having them perform beautiful illumination for you and yours truly.

More Images:  Click on image to Enlarge


Ken Ouyang brings Black Diamond to his bathroom, just like a portable candle…

 

Black Diamond as his bedside night lamp…. BTW no color fairies were harmed in the making of the Black Diamond.

So why do we need your help?

We already have a very complete  and sellable version that we plan to release into the wild, but it’s not yet perfect (according to our idealistic standards). The designing and manufacturing processes for this piece of hardware have been very expensive. Not only do we need more funding to go on with bettering our design (perhaps put in a natural amplifier system), we also think it’s a great time to take our Black Diamond to our audience and see what kind of splash we can make. By pledging at least $45, you will get the latest version of our Black Diamond iPhone Dock and also empathy points for helping us and also rescuing lonely desks from Apple’s attempt to sabotage good looking-ness from your decorative room.