It hasn't been long since Google's Project Ara was ruined

Editor's note: It's only been a short time since it was released, but it's already been ruined. I'm just waiting for a bunch of Transformers to appear when it's released.

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Through Google's open source hardware platform Project Ara, users can assemble a mobile phone by combining components such as camera, battery, processor, etc. like playing with Lego. This assembly method can meet the personalized needs of users, and a module can be updated and replaced individually, and functions can be added or removed at any time without changing the phone.

Thanks to the flexibility of Project Ara, Russia's Lapka company took an unconventional approach and created a strange Ara phone, which subverted people's understanding of mobile phones in terms of both appearance and function.

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The company has always attached great importance to exploring the relationship between the human body and the environment. It once sold environmental sensors in the trendy fashion store Urban Outfitters and won the 2013 Design Innovation Award from Fast Company's Co.Design column.

In the hands of Lapka designers, Ara hardware has become quirky and stylish, with unique colors and shapes, and modules that can detect environmental and health functions such as air quality, carbon dioxide, blood sugar, light, heartbeat, etc. It is said that the design was inspired by high-end designer sneakers that use special materials and have unique textures.

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Whether in terms of appearance or function, it no longer looks like a mobile phone, but more like a product built up of a bunch of smart hardware building blocks.

The Ara phone includes an air quality module, a CO2 module, an optical module, a heart monitoring module, a glucose meter module, and a respiratory detector module. Each module corresponds to an environmental or health monitoring function. It even has a module called "Soul", about which the website states: "We can't say more about this yet."

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Lapka founder Vadik Marmeladove said: "Everything about Project Ara is five years ahead of its time, except for the design. I think its design should also become a visual and cultural milestone." He believes that Google should create a unique design language for Ara hardware design, just like it proposed Material Design for software design on the Android platform.

Marmeladove believes that the Ara platform allows people to expand the shape of the phone in any dimension, turning it into a desktop mobile laboratory. Microscopes and even chairs may become hardware modules for Ara phones. It may sound difficult to understand, but Lapka has already launched a standalone display hardware-it sounds far away from a mobile phone.

In fact, Lapka believes that Project Ara can be used not only to make mobile phones, but also has the potential to become an IoT development platform. Therefore, they asked themselves two questions when designing: 1) How to challenge the limitations of this platform; 2) What if Ara components are everywhere and no longer just a mobile phone?

Google still needs to further define the boundaries of what Ara hardware can and needs to do. Lapka's cross-border design proves that it is far more than a platform for assembling phone parts. What exactly is an Ara phone? Are there any restrictions on the shape and size? There are endless possibilities. But it can't be some weird combination of hardware and the smartphone we know today.