Trance Metals

“What an awesome design! This truly makes the previous sphere portable. I particularly like the Copper for the health benefits. I’m looking forward to backing another of your successful projects!”

 

Why Trance Jewel?

The trance sphere was a wonderful product that turned out better than anyone expected. The quality of the finish was and still is the benchmark of quality in the industry. Everyone who stops by my desk naturally asks about it and the urge to pick it up and hold it is generally irresistible. I myself find myself rolling the sphere in my hand whenever I’m concentrating on a difficult problem. It really does seem to stimulate my thoughts somehow.

I feel like my life has noticeably improved with the sphere at my desk. It gets more attention than the cube, acts as concentration tool and is generally just super cool. There was something missing, however. Whenever I wasn’t at my desk, I found myself without my trusty spherical companion. It is impractical to take with me, even to meetings because of its shape and size. I needed something more portable.

First, I tried just carrying around the mini sphere, but it wasn’t very satisfying at 2 cm in size. It was still a bit uncomfortable to carry, even at that size. With the spinner craze, I tried substituting the sphere with spinners of various types, but they all felt cheap (even solid metal spinners) and uncomfortable compared with the perfect mirror-finish smooth simplicity of the sphere.

I needed to be something that wasn’t awkward or overly heavy, but still retained the sphere’s magical mirror-smoothness and solid feel. At first, it seemed like a relatively easy task. I carried around everyday objects like stones, other metal shapes and pens, but nothing had the right feel. Nothing else was inducing that sense of concentration that the sphere gives.

We decided to make our own shape. It was time to make something new.

After dozens of iterations, paper and 3D mockups, we settled on a shape. We struggled with the exact size and shape since we wanted something thin enough to carry around, but we couldn’t accept any bends or edges.

 

 

We wanted something we could fit in a wallet, but would feel natural in the hand. Even once we settled on a basic shape, we had variations in the mathematical formula that describes the exact nature of the curves.

 

 

We settled on what’s called an oblate spheroid – basically a flattened sphere. When the prototypes came back, we instantly knew we had what we were looking for: A solid portable sphere replacement that induced that same magical feeling the sphere gave us. In fact, I think the Jewel spheroid feels even better in the hand than the sphere, and the portability is better than expected for daily use.