It’s raining collaborated art today, as after BMC and Lamborghini, it’s the turn of Audi to come together with design Clemens Weisshaar and Reed Kram, again at Milan, Italy. This time, it’s not a vehicle in question, but a prototype chair made using lightweight manufacturing methods taken from Audi’s new R18 Ultra race car. The chair is called the R18 Ultra Chair and debuts at the 2012 Salone Internazionale del Mobile, Milan. People can test the chair made using three components, including a carbon composite seat, a carbon-rubber backrest, and aluminum legs that can be packed and stored inside a box. The chair also features a network of sensors to gather crowd-sourced data from visitors, which will be processed using algorithms developed by Weisshaar and Kram to create the most ergonomic final shape for the chair.
When people sit on the chair, the sensors will calculate their unique physical impact and “display it as a real-time false colour force simulation” to highlight the “flow of forces normally hidden from the human eye.” This will help the makers shed excess weight on the final variant of the R18 Ultra Chair, which will launch at the Design Miami 2012 in December.
[R18 Ultrachair via Mashable]