LG Mobile unveiled the winners of its 3rd annual Design the Future Competition. As you may remember (or not), the company invited people to create a mobile phone concept to define the future of mobile communication.
More than 400 designs were submitted during the six-week competition in a battle for more than $80,000 in awards. LG awarded $20,000 plus a Wacom Intuos4 medium tablet to the first place winner, $10,000 to second place and $5,000 to third place. Each of the top three winners will also receive Autodesk’s design and sketching software.
And the winners are…
AL-i concept took the first place. Unfortunately, we don’t have an image of this device to show you. All we know is that it’s a team effort by Zack Filbert, Chris Carpenter, James Connors, and Kees Luyendijk, four second year industrial design students from the same design class in Virginia Tech. Moreover, we know this concept device is envisioned as a smartphone for one-handed use.
The second place winning entry is titled Premium, and it’s a mobile phone with 3D interface that connects the phone and the car together to adjust in-car climate, control the infotainment system, select seat memory, check tire pressure, gauge the fuel amount, etc. The winner, Nouphone Bansasine, is a professional car designer.
Prop Mater’s Choice Award went to Dua Xiong for his design titled the Flutter. It’s a smartphone that fans open to reveal a flexible OLED touchscreen that scrolls radially.
In its press release, LG also talks about two honorable mentions.
First there’s the Atlas, a smartphone that docks into a base which projects the pages, so you can view multiple applications simultaneously. The dock features a tracking system that senses hand gestures, so you can spin the pages in a loop and zoom in and out.
Another honourable mention is the Surface, a watch phone for the blind that features a Braille keypad and a unique shape, so you can distinguish orientation of the phone by feel.
In addition to top three winning designs, LG also presented 37 honorable mentions with $1,000 each.