Universal Kinetic Furniture
Universal Kinetic Furniture promotes a smaller-footprint lifestyle without sacrificing comfort or convenience. Universal Kinetic Furniture is for sleeping, eating, convalescing, consuming media, storing your stuff, working and communicating. The Orb is a touch-sensitive sphere that responds to various simple gestures. While sitting or lying on the Throne, the Orb is used to control Google TV, which provides access to all Internet-based media. Visuals are displayed on a large LCD monitor, and a 5.1 speaker array creates spatial audio that envelops the listener in a rich, full-frequency aural landscape.
The Throne is a highly configurable furniture system that consists of two boxes on wheels. One box supports a surprisingly comfortable small couch, complete with side tables and positionable lamps. The second box has a large video monitor for watching streaming media like Netflix-on-demand, playing video games, writing emails or surfing the web. The two boxes can be rolled together, and the couch unfolds to create a single bed. The boxes contain drawers for storing clothes, media, books, etc.
The Orb, inspired by the 1973 Woody Allen movie Sleeper, is a universal controller for the Throne's media, computer and physical environments. The Orb is a translucent 6” diameter plastic ball. It’s only features are a USB cable emerging at the bottom, and a pattern of tactile pressure sensors that show positions for all ten fingers, thumbs on top, while holding and operating the Orb. A camera on top of the video screen “sees” the orb, and can determine its position in three dimensional space. The Orb is used to move a mouse pointer on screen and to enter text by adjusting individual finger pressure to form chords. This solves the problem of operating a computer while sitting on a couch or lying in bed: you don’t need a surface to mouse on, and you don’t need to switch between two devices (mouse and keyboard) as in traditional human-computer interactions.
Copyright 2012 by Touch Graphics, Inc. USA
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