Those Eyes: The Viral Gadget Trend I Couldn't Escape

Those Eyes 👀

At first I noticed a ton of projects with these “eyes” in the Lopaka.app gallery — like every week someone was drawing them. I couldn’t figure out what the trend was for the longest time.

Then I stumbled across videos of people making primitive robots with Arduino using the same eyes, and I thought, okay that’s pretty cool.

Recently PostHog (the web analytics service) suddenly announced DeskHog—a small desktop gadget with eyes.

And today I learned about Dasai Mochi and absolutely lost my mind: these things are super popular, people are lining up to get one of these little buddies for their dashboard!

Inside there’s a gyroscope and the eye animation reacts to acceleration and turns. Plus they have a bunch of swappable cases for different themes and custom animations with sounds.

It’s wild how simple toys totally hook people.