A great way to send your Chinese food flying.
Nidec Corporation, a Japanese electric motor manufacturing company who has recently developed a reputation for the creative ways in which they use their motors, has come up with a needlessly high-tech update to the classic rotating platter that you often find at Chinese restaurants.
Called the “Smart China Table,” this silly new invention is essentially a motorized “Lazy Susan” that you can control via an app on your smartphone.
The “Smart China Table” has a long list of interesting features. For example, if you just don’t feel like tapping your phone screen to get the platter rotating, you can also just use its voice command functionality to get the plate spinning. However, for some reason the command you have to say is in Chinese… and even more confusing is that the command to get the plate to spin seems to translate to “water spinach” (according to the English subtitles at least).
The Smart China Table also does things like slowing down for soups, helping decide who pays the bill and perhaps most importantly, it allows you to practice your record scratching skills with its DJ mode.
Check out the promotional video for the Smart China Table below and make sure to turn on the English subtitles.
Currently, Nidec seems to have no plans of selling the Smart China Table (although they do claim to have a patent pendingl). This is because this silly product was primarily created as part of Nidec’s ongoing promotional project called “Motorize.” The Motorize project is an attempt by Nidec to show off all of the interesting and unexpected ways that motors can be used, while at the same time increasing the name recognition of Nidec.
In March of this year Nidec released the first volume of their Motorize series. In it they show off what they call a “Smart PET Bottle.” The Smart PET Bottle (PET is a type of plastic) is a motorized bottle cap opener that you can, just like with the Smart China Table, control via an app on your phone.
Since being uploaded to YouTube the Smart PET Bottle video has managed to rack up almost 170,000 views and has been covered by English language websites (although Japankyo was the first one to do so…). The Smart China Table video on the other hand, hasn’t been so successful. Despite it having been released all the way back in August, it seems to have gone mostly unnoticed. Currently, it only has a little over 5,600 views and no English language websites (aside from Japankyo) have covered it. This of course means that if you’d like to see what other crazy ideas Nidec has in store for future volumes, you should probably share the video to help it get more views. So go do that, now.
If you’d like to check out the Smart PET Bottle click here.
Source: Nidec YouTube Channel
Images: Motorize Vol.2 “SMART CHINA TABLE” (Nidec YouTube Channel)
