MIT’s robot furniture, Ori Systems - the future of advanced apartment
Back in 2014, MIT debuted CityHome,
a solution for tiny living spaces with the ability to pack several home
necessities into a single, movable modular unit. Today, the concept —
now renamed Ori Systems, after the Japanese art of origami — is
available for preorder at $10,000 in New York City, Chicago, San
Francisco, Boston, and other major US and Canadian cities.
A collaboration between Fuseproject’s Yves Béhar and MIT Media Lab, Ori Systems,
comes in two sizes, “Ori Full” and “Ori Queen,” and for now, it’s only
available for preorder by real estate developers, with delivery
beginning toward the end of this year. The Ori Systems prototype has
been tested by Airbnb guests in Boston for the past year, and model Ori
Systems are currently installed in apartment complexes in 10 US and
Canadian cities, including The Eugene in New York.
Both sizes of the automated system include a bed,
workstation, drawers, a closet, and storage, but the Queen version comes
with a couch. The Ori Systems are powered through a standard AC plug
connection, and elements can be controlled via the physical Ori control
interface on the side of the unit, an app,
or via voice command with Alexa. (“Hey Alexa, can you ask Ori to make
the bed?”) Ori Systems are also constructed out of lightweight poplar
plywood and on wheels, meaning the unit is easy to manually configure
and move in case of a power outage.
$10,000 for a single unit appears extravagant at first
blush, but purchasing all the pieces of furniture Ori Systems houses
individually would already run the average home owner thousands. (A
medium-range IKEA bed, mattress, and bedding, for example, could cost
around $1,000 alone.) Plus, I don’t know about you, but I can’t command
my bed to do anything, let alone put itself away. It’s also likely that
the price tag is mutable: if Ori Systems proves the market after their
first run, costs could begin to go down as manufacturing scale
increases.
In the first production run, 1,200 units will be produced, and the company hopes to expand to other countries in the near future,
saying it “acknowledge[s] that the need for new urban solutions is a
global challenge.” With micro apartments and rising real estate costs
becoming a normative reality in major urban markets like San Francisco,
New York, Hong Kong,
and Tokyo, Ori Systems comes at a time when many are seeking (and need)
new, innovative ways to do more with less living space... like
commanding your furniture to bring your glass of wine to you.
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