Wing’s Walmart drones are coming to Denver and Seattle — and they won’t drop your parcels in the pool

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Lindsey Austen of Richmond, Texas, ordered cat food, light bulbs, and shoe insoles, then watched a drone hover over her backyard, open its hatch, and drop everything into her pool and hot tub. She had not realized drone delivery was selected at checkout, which might be the most 2026 sentence ever written. Her video of the splash went around the internet, and Amazon called the whole thing rare. I bring it up because that was an Amazon Prime Air drone, and it has very little in common with the Wing aircraft headed for Denver and Seattle. Same sky, completely different philosophy about where a package should end up.

Wing and Walmart announced on October 5 that Denver and Seattle join their drone network in 2027, part of a plan covering 270-plus Walmart stores. Wing’s Hummingbird hovers around 23 feet up and lowers the box on a tether, so a pool is only in play if you tell it to aim there. It cruises at up to 60 mph, and the bigger version carries up to five pounds (Wing’s own numbers). Walmart sells the whole thing as groceries in as little as 30 minutes, with Wing claiming a 23 minute average. I wanted to know what that promise looks like over your street, and what it means for delivery drivers.

Designer: Wing for Walmart

The Hummingbird is a hybrid, which means rotors for vertical lift and a fixed wing for cruising, so it launches like a drone and travels like a tiny airplane. Wing’s two versions weigh 14 and 24.3 pounds at max takeoff, per FAA filings, and the heavier one hauls up to roughly five pounds of payload. Both come out of Wing’s Aircraft Library, a parts-bin approach where shared components get remixed into different sizes. Wing built the bigger one after finding about 30 percent of deliveries needed multiple flights, according to The Register. Neither lands in your yard. They hover, lower the box on a tether, and release it at ground level.

Compare that with Amazon’s MK30, which weighs about 78 pounds empty (per DroneXL’s comparison table) and, according to Axios, comes down closest to the customer. Wing’s bet is the opposite: keep the heavy part high and put only a cardboard box within reach of your dog. It also skips a parachute, which Zipline’s 55 pound aircraft carries, so the safety case rests on being small and light. I love that as industrial design logic, because every ounce shaved is a risk shaved. Parachute research like the kirigami parachute concept chases safety by adding something, while Wing chases it by subtracting.

Wing’s own presentation puts average flight time at five minutes or less, which implies most of that 23 minutes happens on the ground. In the air, FAA filings authorize up to 400 flights per nest per day across 368 nests, which DroneXL tallies to 147,200 flights daily on paper. Wing has had a crash too: a drone on a return flight went down and caught fire in Kemah, Texas on March 1, with a power line suspected and nobody hurt. Part 108, the FAA’s routine beyond-line-of-sight rule, has sat at the White House since July 10. Meanwhile, Castle Rock and Parker froze hub permits, though towns control the parking lot and the FAA controls the sky.

Five pounds is a hard ceiling, so drones chase the small stuff first, and Walmart says customers use them for forgotten ingredients and cold medicine. DoorDash insists Dashers stay central as it launches its own drone service, while a Wing operations director has described drones as skipping recruiting, insurance, commissions, and no-shows. Concepts like the DJI Express UAV already imagine cargo hopping between cities without a dedicated driver, so the direction of travel is clear. I’d guess the first gigs to feel the squeeze are the quick, small, suburban runs. The Hummingbird’s whole trick is delivering small things gently, and Austen’s hot tub is a reminder that picking the drop spot is half the job.

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LA’s 60-Foot Light Sculpture Actually Makes Music Visible

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An orchestra can fill a room with sound, yet the experience of that sound is mostly invisible. For someone curious about live classical music, a screen might seem like the obvious way to make a performance feel more immediate. But projected images can also pull attention away from the musicians. Grimanesa Amorós’s Radiance offers a more interesting answer: let the room itself help tell the story.

Commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the light sculpture was created for performances of Alexander Scriabin’s Prometheus: The Poem of Fire at Walt Disney Concert Hall. It hung above the orchestra while a programmed sequence of colors unfolded with the music. Amorós also coordinated the hall’s existing lights with the sculpture, so the effect reached beyond the stage and into the audience’s surroundings.

Designer: Grimanesa Amorós

At 60 feet long and 35 feet wide, Radiance has the scale to command a room. It is made with reflective material and rope-like LED tubing that changes color. Those practical details matter because this is not a video pretending to be a physical object. The light occupies real space above real musicians, and its shifting glow can change how the hall feels without replacing the performance at its center.

The sequence was planned second by second around the orchestra, with six major synchronized moments. I like that distinction. A lighting effect that reacts to every beat could easily become a demonstration of clever technology. Here, the programming is closer to staging: deliberate enough to give a musical passage a visual shape, but not so busy that it asks the audience to watch for the next trick.

Fire is the work’s starting point, which makes sense beside a piece called Prometheus. Amorós draws on both the Greek figure who gave fire to humanity and Viracocha, an Incan creator deity. That could have led to a very literal display of flames. Instead, Radiance treats fire as an idea that can move through color, intensity and space. Its subject is transformation, not an illustration of a myth.

That choice gives the installation room to breathe. A red glow above the orchestra can feel urgent; amber spreading across the sculpture, stage and seating can feel warmer and more expansive. Neither color needs to tell viewers precisely what the music means. The visual experience can accompany the sound while leaving people free to make their own connections, which is more generous than spelling out every emotion for them.

Walt Disney Concert Hall is hardly a blank canvas. Its interior already gives a performance a strong visual setting. Rather than treating that architecture as a backdrop, Amorós made the house lighting part of the same sequence as the sculpture. That feels like the smartest design move here. If the room changes with the music, the audience is included in the experience instead of simply looking up at an object.

It is tempting to describe a project like this as a concert crossed with a light show, but that sells both halves short. The appeal is not that classical music has been dressed up to compete with a pop spectacle. It is that visual design can make an existing performance feel more accessible without demanding a new set of habits from the listener. You can follow the colors closely or let them register at the edges of your attention.

There is a risk with any large-scale installation that the photographs become the main event. Radiance certainly photographs well, especially when its strands glow against the hall’s interior. But its real purpose depended on timing, sound and the shared experience of sitting in the room. Presented across three performances, it was made for a particular encounter rather than an endlessly repeatable display.

That is why Radiance stays with me as a design idea. It does not try to explain Scriabin’s music or promise that light can replace listening. It addresses a smaller, more human problem: how to help an audience feel connected to something they cannot see. By giving the music a presence overhead and around the seats, Amorós made the concert hall feel less like a container for a performance and more like part of it.

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Vollebak Built a $50,000 “Rock Jacket” Out of 54,000 Actual Wearable Slate Tiles

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Rock has been around for billions of years. Humans have been around for a few million. In that time we figured out how to wear fur, leather, wool, cotton, plastic, and even iron, yet rock never made the cut. We used it for spears, houses, pyramids, and sculptures, but nobody looked at a boulder and thought it would make a great bomber. Fair enough, since rock is brilliant at sitting still and clothes are mostly about moving. Vollebak looked at that problem and decided to build the bomber anyway, out of actual slate.

The Rock Jacket is a one-off cropped Harrington covered in roughly 54,000 slate tiles (per Dezeen’s count), each 0.2 inches (5mm) square and 0.02 inches (0.5mm) thick, bonded to a neoprene backing. The material comes from French material technologist Steven Leprizé, who adapted his WooWood elastic marquetry, a technique he originally built around tiny wooden tiles. Leprizé says it takes 50 steps to make, and cutting the tiles is the hardest of them. The finished piece has taped seams, Cordura pockets, and a zip, so it looks wearable enough for a party. It is listed at $50,000, which is a lot for a jacket and a bargain for millions of years of geology.

Designers: Steven Leprizé & Vollebak

Vollebak got here by way of wood. The label first called Leprizé about a more wearable version of its Wooden Jacket, a prototype built from 250,000 pieces of laser-cut American walnut. Leprizé grew up between his grandfather’s sawmill and his father’s workshop, trained at École Boulle in Paris, and now leads a team of 12 in a studio that is half atelier, half laboratory. He had something else to show them, a slate version of WooWood with the same grid of 5mm tiles. Vollebak had already spent a year chasing a wearable rock jacket, so the timing could not have been better.

Slate is a layered metamorphic rock with natural cleavage planes, so sheets just 0.02 inches (0.5mm) thick can be peeled off a slab. Those sheets arrive at roughly 39 by 20 inches (100 by 50cm), and the hard part is cutting them into 0.2 inch tiles without losing one. Leprizé built a bespoke 11.5-foot (3.5m) cutting machine that he says beats a laser cutter, but it was designed for wood, so slate cost him several ruined sheets. The tiles are then glued under pressure to neoprene with an adhesive developed with 3M engineers in Switzerland. The rubber comes from a UK supplier whose core business is fetishwear, which earned Leprizé some funny looks at the office.

At 0.2 inches a tile, the surface reads like a pixelated texture, with light sliding across the folds in blocky gradients, as if a game engine were struggling with a boulder. Vollebak itself compares it to a glitching Minecraft texture pack, or brutalist smart casual for a Coruscant cocktail party. Where the sleeve bends, the tiles lift and overlap like woven leather, and I kept thinking of Bottega Veneta’s intrecciato. Stitching slate was never an option, so the seams are taped, which ended up outlining the diamond pockets and shoulder panels like a graphic. The tiles ruled out tight fits, so the cropped, boxy Harrington is basically the rock’s idea of a good fit.

Vollebak has already turned Dyneema, the fiber used to haul ships, into an Indestructible Jacket, worked stainless steel into a blazer, and released a $3,995 jacket called FWAHBL in a run of ten. The Rock Jacket tops them all on price and ambition, with a commercially viable version planned in about two years. Co-founder Nick Tidball mentioned that once you make a jacket out of rock, everything else seems easy, which is quite a flex. Vollebak admits this version is not practical, which I respect in a $50,000 jacket. Leprizé is already developing granite, marble, sandstone, and schist versions, and I badly want to see someone in a marble bomber.

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