Self driving furniture

For quite a while now I’ve been interested in the idea of furniture that reconfigures itself according to use. I wrote about this in a post here several years ago.

But it’s been hard to get people excited about the concept. You need to explain about modular motor platforms, power solutions, vision and path-planning algorithms, in addition to the down to earth parts of it all, such as room scheduling and accommodating mixed use.

Now, with the gradual emergence of untethered virtual reality, furniture that can get out of your way, or can reconfigure itself to allow a single room to mimic different physical locations, is newly relevant. It’s not just a convenience — it becomes integral to research into future reality.

And I realize that phrases like “robotic furniture” just don’t cut it. There’s too much that needs to be explained. So I’ve started rebranding this idea as “self driving furniture”, which evokes a much clearer and more detailed image of what is going on.

Today, during a space planning meeting at NYU, I mentioned that in several years I would like our lab to transition to self-driving furniture. This got the attention of my colleague whose research is in machine learning. I could tell from his appreciative laugh that he didn’t quite believe that I have every intention of doing this.

But he knew exactly what I was talking about.