This smart tank can grow anything from basil leaves to poison dart frogs

Shiny rectangular cuboid!

While your excitement for three dimensional geometric shapes is admirable, there’s far more to the Biopod than looking like a Tate Modern sculpture – it’s a microhabitat on steroids.

The clever tank lets you grow anything from plants and flowers, to reptiles and fish, while minimising the fuss normally associated with keeping closed internal environments finely balanced.

Wait, you can grow frogs in it?

Not literally. Perhaps raise would be a better word. Semantics aside, caring for reptiles or certain types of fish can be a demanding job. There are tonnes of things to keep track of and continually monitor, from light and temperature, to oxygen levels – an imbalance of which can often result in a multitude of ex-pets.

The Biopod is designed to take out all the hard work and hassle, thanks to its variety of in-built sensors which send off their data to the cloud, where it can be monitored, with adjustments made accordingly.

An accompanying app lets you choose what you want to use the tank for, and that can be anything from growing herbs or decorative plants, to forming a healthy environment for various reptiles and fish.

Plus, you know, it looks rather pretty.

And expensive.

Not massively so. You can currently pre-order your own Biopod for CA$280 from Kickstarter, where it’s already smashed through its CA$30,000 goal by raising CA$113,283 at the time of writing.

If all goes well, the units will be shipped out in December this year, so you could start the new year off with your very own frog pal.