We’ve produced a fair few custom umbrellas in the past for our clients, but nothing like this one, which takes the rainy day blues into a completely different realm.

The Pileus umbrella has a projector in its handle that emits what would have to be one hell of ray of light to project photos or video onto the under belly of the old faithful umbrella. This is an interesting concept by the team at Pileus who also offers a web service type plug-in that will log into a Flickr or YouTube account and display your favorite pictures and video while you’re out and about trying to stay dry.

We are told this is still in the prototype stage and unless Pileus can somehow come up with a viable and cost effective solution to have their super projector (that will presumably out shine daylight) roll onto a production line, it will probably lose a lot of the impact during the daylight hours.
We think that if we strip back all the web gadgets attached to this idea and build in a LED projector to beam simple things like time and logos, we might just save on the battery power required to run the thing and possibly have ourselves a promotional product worth doing. Now there’s a thought for my next visit to our engineers in China.