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If 2017 showed us anything, it was that it’s no longer just researchers working on the bleeding edge UX and UI of the future. Corporations are getting into it, too, in the massively competitive world of Silicon Valley. We all expect zany inventions to be born out of places like MIT, but who would have thought it would be Snapchat–a publicly traded company–that would fulfill the dream of placing digital objects in the real world?

Here are some of the best experimental interface prototypes and concepts from 2017.

[Image: Snapchat]

Snapchat’s World Lens Objects

Say what you will about Snap’s business viability–more than any other company, Snap has sucked us into the possibility of AR. This year, it one-upped its selfie lenses with World Lenses, which allowed you to drop real (err, digital) 3D objects like rainbows into your photos and videos. More recently, Snap opened the World Lens platform for anyone to design these lenses, too. Granted, Facebook is going blow-for-blow with Snap with its own AR releases, and Google just added Star Wars AR objects to its Pixel line of phones. But if one thing is clear in 2017, it’s this: augmented reality is here, en masse. It may just be getting started. And we have Snap to thank–or curse–for it.

[Source Images: Gilles Lambert/Unsplash, photominus/iStock, Marina_Skoropadskaya/iStock]

Voice Assistants Hacked With Inaudible Frequencies

Who knew that the voice assistants inside our iPhones, Android devices, and Windows computers were all vulnerable to the same, simple trick? Using a technique called the DolphinAttack, a team from Zhejiang University translated typical vocal commands like “open the back door” into ultrasonic frequencies that are too high for the human ear to hear, but perfectly decipherable by the microphones and software powering our always-on voice assistants. Researchers were able to direct Macbooks to malicious websites and redirect car GPSs to new locations. Hopefully, this vulnerability is being plugged. But the meantime, what an ingenious UI hack–one that was, thankfully, pulled off by the good guys!

[Photo: nimnull/iStock (texture)]

Playful Palette Color Mixing

This year Adobe Research and the University of Toronto debuted an experiment called Playful Palette that lets you mix colors in a stretchy, blended puddle. The effect is downright beautiful. Each color mix is like its own little snapshot of wall-ready abstract art. But crucially, as you work putting colors to the virtual canvas, you automatically save the colors that you’ve already used around the wheel. Hopefully, we’ll see it inside Adobe products soon.

[Illustration: courtesy Argodesign]

The UX Of Amazon + Whole Foods

When Amazon bought Whole Foods this year, nobody knew what to expect–save for, perhaps, the studio Argodesign, which quickly conceptualized all sorts of hardware and software possibilities, ranging from a two-sided refrigerator that would allow Amazon to deliver produce, to a hydroponic garage garden where Whole Foods would grow you produce. While mere concepts, we’ve already seen some of Argodesign’s theories come true: Namely, both Amazon and Walmart have announced plans to deliver goods all the way inside your house. Walmart will even stock your fridge.

[Image: The Unseen]

Color Changing Hair Dye

What if you could change your hair color–without getting it dyed and re-dyed? That’s the promise of a project by the studio, The Unseen, which created a color-changing hair dye that’s exactly as magical as it sounds: With a sharp temperature change, the dye shifts hues on its own, as if spellbound. The dye debuted at London Fashion Week, but sadly to all fans of The Craft, it’s not yet commercially available.