This Incredible Shapeshifting Table Responds To Your Movements In Dramatic Fashion

Tables have been a pretty static fixture in our homes for thousands of years, but a few MIT designers have been inspired to totally rethink the way we interact with this furniture staple.

The MIT team unveiled a new table called "Transform" at Milan Design Week, which is a successor to a similar design project called "inFORM." The Transform table senses the kinetic energy of people when they view the table, and that energy causes the table to display rippling movements in a mesmerizing pattern.

The motions on the Transform table, according to the team, are inspired by movements in nature, mimicking the patterns of wind, water, and sand. The idea behind Transform is to show the conflict between nature and machine.

While you probably won't see a table like this in IKEA any time soon, Hiroshi Ishii, one of the head designers on Transform, hopes that his concepts of motion and interactivity will be incorporated into future products in some way or another.

"We are thinking of a few ideas for commercial products, but it takes many years, so we focus on concepts," Ishii told Business Insider. "We invented Transform to convey machine beauty in dynamic motions, to make people think differently, stimulate people to think outside of the box."

Watch the table in action:

The Transform table is made up of three dynamic shape displays.

They move more than 1,000 pins up and down to create the shapeshifting effect.

When someone approaches the table, it will sense their kinetic energy to drive a wave of movement.

It also works without any human energy, moving around autonomously in different patterns.

You can watch the whole video of Transform in action: