Interactive LED Coffee Table

Perhaps your living room isn’t sparkly enough, or you want to add some pizazz to your next home coffee klatch. I submit the interactive LED coffee table:

The table was built by Jeffrey “Toast” McGrew and Jillian Northrup of Because We Can, a design-build firm operating out of a nondescript converted barn in Oakland. I toured their facility back in August and the place looked like a few geniuses had exploded in it: nearly every piece of furniture in their apartment above the workshop was built by their CNC-driven tools, and all were functional, weird, and wonderful. What’s a “design-build” firm, you may be asking? Well, in short, you make up something, anything, and they figure out a way to build it.

I saw the table in action myself, as Toast and Jillian have one in their living room, and it works as advertised; even in direct sunlight the table responds easily to anything set on it, and you can even create rippling effects with a little dexterity. For the record, the table in the video is transparent so you can see its inner workings for demo purposes, but the finished product looks much cooler:

It’s neat, it looks great, and if you’ve got $2100 burning a hole in your pocket you can get one for yourself.