The original note, as written at the time
A description of an indoor mobility vehicle similar to a lift but which is more manoeuvrable and can move sideways too.
Ongoing development
An indoor mobility vehicle like a lift, but more manoeuvrable, and able to move sideways.
The vertical lift solved one axis and stopped, and the stop is where most of the friction in a building actually lives. A lift takes you to a floor. It does not take you to a room, and the distance from the lift lobby to the room is the part that excludes people — the corridor, the door, the threshold, the turn.
A cabin that can move in three axes inside a building dissolves the lobby as a concept. It becomes a vehicle that arrives at the door, which is a completely different experience of a building for someone who cannot walk far.
The engineering is a cabin suspended from a rail grid rather than a shaft, which means the building has to be designed around it. That is the reason it does not exist: a lift is retrofittable and a rail grid is not.
The honest trade is that a grid needs headroom on every floor and a structural spine to carry it, so the building gets more expensive per square metre and much more usable per square metre at the same time. Whether that adds up depends entirely on what the building is for.
The best early market is not offices. It is hospitals and hotels — anywhere a trolley or a person must get to a specific door, and where the corridor is a design failure that everyone has agreed to live with.
A building that can bring the vehicle to the room is a building that has stopped assuming legs.