Motion-Controlled Furniture

MIT’s Tangible Media Group showed off Transform, a table that can change shape based on the motions (and emotions) of the people around it, at the Lexus Design Amazing display during Milan Design Week.

The structure is made of 1,152 plastic pins controlled by microprocessors. A Kinect (working with a computer program that controls the movements) can sense when someone approaches the device. According to the project’s web page:

The work is comprised of three dynamic shape displays that move more than one thousand pins up and down in real time to transform the tabletop into a dynamic tangible display. The kinetic energy of the viewers, captured by a sensor, drives the wave motion represented by the dynamic pins.

Some of the same technology was used in the group’s previous inFORM project, which used human motion to affect a 3D display.

Source: Wired