One of the advantages of being in the forefront of technological development is that in the course of this pursuit, a company can create something that isn’t in its list of priorities. That seems to have been the case over there at Nissan->ke62 after the company announced the “Intelligent Parking Chair,” a concept->ke169 it conceived through its development of intelligent park assist technology.->ke1701

The idea behind the Intelligent Parking Chair is similar to how drivers can easily park their vehicles through automatic steering. But, instead of that setting, this tech can be used in an office environment. Imagine a chair automatically moving to a set position without any kind of force acting on it. That’s the gist of this new tech developed by Nissan, and it’s one that could prove to be mighty useful in offices all over the world.

So how does the Intelligent Parking Chair work exactly? According to Nissan, the chair works in concert with cameras placed on a room’s ceiling. These cameras are responsible for wirelessly transmitting the chair’s position to a system that indicates where it’s supposed to go. The chair also has rollers that allows it to move independently, depending on where it’s routed to by the cameras. When in motion, the chair actually moves by itself without any assistance, kind of like the ones you see in horror movies, except that technology is making these chairs move and not some kind of otherworldly spirit.

Nissan has already adopted this technology on a number of its models, including the European-spec X-Trail Hybrid. It’s unclear if the company plans to source these chairs to other businesses, but it certainly looks like one of those new technological breakthroughs that will have no problem fitting into any kind of office space.

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Why it matters

It’s funny how things sometimes work out even if that’s not exactly what you had in mind in the first place. Now, I don’t know if Nissan was actively pursuing this technology or if it just happened by sheer chance. I’d like to think that it was somewhere in the middle, which is really the most difficult place to find yourself in when you’re trying to do something else entirely different and you bump into something that could be used for an entirely different purpose.

Whatever the case may be, the Intelligent Parking Chair is proof oh how automakers are really pushing past the boundaries of technological innovation in the pursuit of finding the next evolution in the industry. In doing so, the company managed to create something that can be of great value someplace else.

Personally, I want to see these Intelligent Parking Chairs become more than just a concept. I want to see them used for everyday office life to go with the way Nissan plans to use automatic parking technology for its future vehicles. At the very least, those offices will be much easier to keep in order when you have chairs that automatically go where they’re supposed to go without anybody doing anything. I for one wouldn’t mind having this kind of chair around.

On a grander scale, this kind of advancement is why the auto industry is so incredible. It may not be in the forefront of technology the way other industries are, but rest assured, it’s come so far to the point that it is one of the most technologically advanced businesses in the world.

I mean, an electric parking chair? Only the auto industry can cook something like that up.