I’ve had an overdosis of interactive tables a while ago but that doesn’t mean that i can’t be impressed by some of them anymore:
A town emerges on the top of Keiko Takahashi‘s Diorama Table when people place everyday objects on it.
When you put a cup on a table, trees and houses appear on the table. When you put a rope, it becomes a railroad and trains start running along it. The trains decide a starting point and an end point, search the fastest route, and run to follow the ropes. They avoid crashing each other, the computer decides the prior train and other train waits.
When participant place spoons, forks, or chopsticks, which have slender shapes on the table, cars appear and start to run on the table. If they add cups and saucers on the table, houses, trees and buildings will appear around them. When participants drop off breadcrumbs on the table, a dog appears and runs to the breadcrumbs and bites them.
Made me think of Yumiko Tanaka‘s Plable, a perfectly normal-looking table, but on its underside, children can build an imaginary world; and of Minim++‘s lovely Tool’s Life. When physical objects on a table are touched, their shadow magically begin to move and can assume forms which can be either very poetical or threatening, revealing their true character or their secret wishes.
Moritz Waldemeyer recently presented two game tables at 100% design London. He used the technology that was first shown in Zaha Hadid’s Z-Island kitchen , but in a more playful and simple way. The Pong table has a matrix of 2500 LEDs integrated in the Corian surface, and together with two touch pads (like the mouse pad on a laptop) they recreate the classic Pong game.
The Roulette table is a modern design of the casino classic. The hanging light signifies the roulette wheel and when activated, LEDs are creating the circular motion of the ball. The table surface is illuminated from within to show the map where the bets are placed. When the croupier starts the game, lights in the lamp start running in a circle, while the numbers on the table flash in a random sequence. When the flashing stops, the single winning number remains illuminated.
Thanks to the practicality of the Corian material, both tables can be used as dining tables: when the games are switched off, the technology disappears completely.