This week’s video comes from Japan where Nissan has incorporated park assist technology into office chairs that tidy themselves under tables and desks on command.
Using a similar principle that allows drivers to park their vehicles using automatic steering, the automaker has modified office chairs respond to hand claps.
In the automotive world, Intelligent Park Assist uses four cameras on the car’s front, rear, and both wing mirrors. According to Nissan, the system converts video footage from the cameras and composites a virtual bird’s-eye view image that allows automatic steering.
Similarly, the so-called Intelligent Parking Chair uses four cameras placed in four corners of a room’s ceiling where they locate the chair’s current position in order for the system to calculate the chair’s route to its original position.
In a company statement, Nissan said: “With this innovation in office technology, Japanese businessmen are now freed from the troublesome task of arranging chairs.”
More pertinently, they add: “The concept aims at increasing knowledge around the latest technology adopted by Nissan vehicles, while showing how this is slowly changing our daily lives.”
Presumably these chairs are battery powered. So someone has to go around plugging in a recharger. What have you gained? Unless of course, when it parks, it also plugs itself in.
It beggars belief that it is considered too troublesome to put a chair back under a table when it’s finished with.
How lazy are we becoming as a species????
Everyone ought to watch the film “Wally” … it shows what we might turn to if we stop … moving!
It’s Japan. In the early 90s they had flat screen TVs in every subway car for running commercials. (What am I doing here? I should be in Japan, relaxing in an onsen.)
Fascinating. I might get one for home. It will amuse the cat.
Be a little more generous chaps! This is the start of a revolution. Dinner parties, formal dinners for visiting National Guests , weddings, location of directors at ‘bored’ meetings (any meetings for that matter) -Parliament (s) (Lords and Commons and Europe, East, West) -mine-host need never again have to decide who sits where: because from now on the technology will be used before, not after the gathering! to decide who is senior, a waste of space, talks too much, will argue with who…
I am reminded of one of the very earliest uses for such logic. By 1943, the US Army had millions of raw recruits. They knew enough about each of their past experience(s) and skills and abilities and the US Army wished to create military units with a broad ‘mix’ of abilities. The punch-card reader was programmed to select to certain criteria to create this mix: and it might be said that this was the first instance when computing decided who would live and who would die, depending to which theatre units were eventually sent.
The flat screens in Japan’s subway cars were sponsored by Sharp. They used the public for their endurance tests. This way they promoted their technology, got the failed units back for further investigation and saved the electricity for running the units all day.
So when Nissan uses park assist technology in meeting room chairs they might have similar intentions – use new technology in non-critical applications first to develop it further.
But would it move with a person sitting in it?
Does this matter for testing the control’s preciseness?
Fast forward the video to 38 seconds to see the answer Michael.
Alistair, it isn’t about laziness or how troublesome it is to put chairs away. The Japanese have OCD in their DNA so the prospect of randomly distributed chairs must cause severe trauma by conflicting with their innate need for order in all things. Those of us with more Anglo-Saxon genes will of course wish to stick two fingers up to anything that decides what is best for us and challenges our fundamental right to leave a chair where we damn well please. This of course is why in the broader scheme of things autonomous vehicles will struggle to gain popular support.
“anglo-saxon” genes-“stick two fingers” -really JW, what a suggestion. Don’t you know ‘we’ technologists are at the very bottom of the social heap: and must accept whatever our betters tell us. You might enjoy a short note I felt able to write to a (young lady) MP: portrayed on the Parliament programme as ignorantly and arrogantly ‘questioning’ senior executives of Goodle, Twitter, Facebook at some committee looking into allowing ‘them’ to inspect our browsing habits.
“I believe this was aggressive, and improper: Needless to say you achieved little. Your comment about ‘Technical companies’ telling Parliament’ was particularly offensive. Your subsequent body language indicated to me at least, that that sad combination of ignorance and arrogance – so often noted in ‘Thatcher’s children”- is present. “If you are not with me, you must be against me”. No, I am happy to simply note what you say and how you act and keep my own counsel.
I believe you, most other clerks and lawyers and indeed Parliament itself has no idea whatsoever of the complete irrelevance of most of your joint and several ‘modi’ in the present and rapidly expanding technological driven era. You are being and will continue to be literally swept aside by the advances those of us with the benefit of an education in Technology, Science and Engineering are developing in the ascent of man: and a good job too. I write as one, who had the privilege of enjoying a close and delightful link to Mr Speaker Weatherill in the 90s. I was his Poet to Parliament amongst other tasks. MJB