The iPhone Ocarina

A YouTube is worth 1,000 words




The video clip shows you how it works, and its great fun to play with. Costs 79 euro cents. Very easy to get started with little breaths.

Perhaps the cleverest aspect of this invention is the way Smule have made the toy viral. The app also lets you see any other ocarina players out there. There is a navigable 'earth' interface that allows you to zoom in and select named ocarina players. The app politely invites you to switch 'location services' on when you launch it.

Its a beautiful toy, a brilliant design, a very sweet application. It also leads me to wonder how inventors are going to start thinking about the social interactions we have with literary objects, books, magazines and documents when we access them from mobile devices as smooth and seductive as the iPhone.