A neat table design

I've sometimes had the experience that when you go to a dinner at a restaurant with a large number of people and you sit at a long table you essentially have no interaction with many of the people at the dinner. I had this idea that if you had a table made of modular components on a track that moved slowly over time you would have each person that wasn't next to you opposite you for a short period.

Then a while ago there was a New Yorker article: A Good Table about a clever design and I looked up the patent 6,375,256 which was exactly that.



There is a Swiss company, Dynamic Meetings, that makes such a product (maybe).