Never push your chair in again. That’s the promise of a new robotic “self-driving” chair from Nissan.
The seat that parks itself works a little like clap-on-clap-off lights: Clap once, and an entire roomful of office chairs usher themselves back into their spots, Marie Kondo-neatfreak-style.
The chairs are rigged up to a bird’s-eye office camera system via Wi-Fi. Four cameras keep track of each chair’s position and help steer the chairs back into place with all the precision of a Japanese tea service. Nissan powers the driving, while Japanese chair company Okamura provides the seat:
But you’re probably not going to be able to buy these wonder chairs for your own office anytime soon. (Which is probably for the best, since it’s unclear what clap-powered chairs would do if the whole office ever burst into applause.)
The concept chairs were designed to show off Nissan’s “Intelligent Parking Assist” technology. It’s a camera-based car system that can steer a vehicle into a parking spot hands-free, while the driver applies the brakes and the gas.
Get Data Sheet, Coins2Day’s technology newsletter.
Intelligent parking assist is a first in what Nissan reports will be a fleet of self-driving technologies for consumer vehicles: The company tells Coins2Day it will be adding more autonomous features to ten vehicle models over the next four years. Nissan also expects to make a fully self-driving car by 2020, something the company is testing out on the roads in California now.
Until then, at least the chairs know how to drive.
