Who says cars and drones are the only inanimate objects worthy of the gift of autonomy? Nissan has breathed autonomy into the fibers of office furniture, enabling what it calls Intelligent Parking Chairs to propel themselves back into place after being disturbed by humans.
The way the chairs work is they rely on WiFi and room sensing cameras mounted in the corners of rooms to direct the chairs back to where they belong.
It's akin to the "Clap on, clap off" lights that made people in the 1980s think flying cars, flying robots, teleportation, self-driving cars and virtual reality where just around the corner – turns out, some of those were.
With just a clap of the hands, Nissan's Intelligent Parking Chairs will sort themselves from whatever mess they were left in and will return to their original positions in an orderly fashion – imagine the productivity gains to be had by no longer having to push a chair back in after a meeting!
For those concerned trolls who would, with the clap of their hands, want to send a room full of seated people back to order, a la Magneto, the chairs will only respond to claps when they're empty. Well, that's unless they've been hacked.
So this is a novelty, but it's proof that autonomous vehicle technology has implications far beyond the automotive field. That's true, even if we still haven't found any many compelling reasons to give other objects autonomy – and that's not to say self-parking chairs are uncool.
Scaling the technology up a bit, it could have more practical use in state-of-the-art auditoriums and cafeterias where the next engagement is oftentimes more important to people than straightening chairs.
But alas, this is more about selling cars than chairs. Nissan's autonomous cars were still described as a "white knuckle affair" last month by Re/code, but the automaker plans to get all of that sorted in a few years. It's already started testing its prototype in Japan, and by 2020, Nissan hopes to have its self-driving cars shuttling the consumers along public roads.
For now, check out Nissan's Intelligent Parking Chairs in the video below:
