Cool Hunting

Home Planetarium
This portable planetarium projects 10,000 stars onto any ceiling and is not a toy but a genuine educational tool (slash conversation piece). It only needs a projection distance of about 10 feet, so it's quite practical, even in relatively confined quarters. Weighing in at less than three pounds, with a price tag just under $230 and featuring adjustable angles, the home planetarium is perfect...

TileToy
Created by Finnish media artist and designer Tuomo Tammenpää along with Brit mobile game developer Daniel Blackburn, TileToy is a modular, re-programmable LED toy. A sleek white plastic box encases the LED components and each magnetic cube communicates wirelessly, enabling a wide variety of games - from anagrams to arithmetic problems - that use numbers, letters, or shapes. Still in prototype stage, inventors plan...

Mimoco goSeries
The good kids over at Mimoco just announced their new line of USB storage toys and gave us the first peek. The goSeries of mimobots was designed by Yahid Rodriguez who also designed the first run of mimobots, the preorder direct from Mimoco (they'll ship in early December, just in time for the holidays). With only 500 of each bot produced, these crazy little...

Oddzballz
Oddzballz are mobile phone charms created by Elsa Kawai. Slupeez, Qwepeez and Oddbeez (left to right) are each available in an edition of 200. Phone charms are quite popular in Asia, but haven't quite taken off here in the US yet. Maybe making them a limited edition thing is the twist needed to tip. Thanks, Kevin....

Cardboard Rocket Play House
What child isn't fascinated with space? Luckily, Nigel's Eco Store, an online purveyor of fun, stylish and environmentally sound homewares, came up with this Cardboard Rocket Play House. Made of sturdy recycled cardboard it arrives plain and unpainted so that the kids can decorate it however they want. Made by a designer with over 20 years of experience in the packaging industry, the rocket...

Tatebanko Paper Diorama Kit
Appealing to my weakness for dioramas and DIY paper projects, these kits also are a mini lesson on Tatebanko, the forgotten Edo-era Japanese art of creating perspectives from paper. They come in either a snowy scene representing a painting by the master Hiroshige or in a version of Hokusai's wave. Designed and printed in Japan by It's a Beautiful Day (the group leading the...