MIT’s CityHome Can Make Your Apartment Huge
Gloria Hepburn
Jun 23, 2014
A futuristic device that can make your tiny apartment feel and work like a spacious penthouse, the CityHome is a motorized and compact ‘home in a box‘, created by the Changing Places team from MIT Media Lab. Making a 200 square foot space feel like a room three times its size is no joke, and CityHome executes that job seamlessly.
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The multipurpose invention expands and collapses with a wave of your hand or the sound of your voice, thanks to its built-in sensors, motors and LED lights.
How Does It Work?
All this talk will make you wonder what it is exactly that is inside the magical CityHome. The ‘home in a box‘ incorporates a bed, a workspace, a dining table for six, a kitchen counter, a stovetop and a multipurpose storage space. Stocked perfectly inside a large closet-sized module, the unit is built atop low friction rollers.
Sliding In And Out
Shrinking and expanded its interior spaces as you need, the mechanical box slides easily around your apartment. The technology used is similar to ‘Minority Report‘, and responds to everything from gestures and touch to voice commands.
Still A Prototype
Developed by lead researcher Kent Larson, CityHome is still in prototype stage and the team definitely intends to bring the product to the market. This task, according to Kent, can be accomplished with the help of either crowdfunding or a commercial sponsor.
Making Use Of Space
If you take into consideration the amount of space you will be saving with this technology, that little extra amount that you’ll pay for it will be simply trivial in comparison to the $1000 per square foot in Boston. About the size of a closet, CityHome sits snugly in your living space making it bigger without attacking your bank account.
Why CityHome Is Boss
While it certainly seems like a promising solution to stretch a closet into a small apartment, CityHome seems even more attractive as a way to stretch any small apartment into a slightly more livable one.
