A universally acknowledged truth about living in New York City is that there's very little space to go around. What passes for an entire apartment in Manhattan is considered a walk-in closet in Des Moines. This dearth of square footage has resulted in a couple notable phenomenons: Namely, pocket-emptying rents and some—let's just call it—creative uses of space.

I recently glimpsed one particularly unusual vision of our inevitable micro-living future. Twenty floors up in a luxury midtown Manhattan studio apartment, a hulking piece of furniture sat pressed against the wall. From the front it looked like an entertainment console with built in shelving. From the side, it appeared to be a regular bookshelf, save for a small button. At nine feet tall, five feet wide and seven feet long, the thing took up nearly a fourth of the apartment's main living area, leaving just enough space for what could either be a livingroom or bedroom, but definitely not both.

"This is Ori," said Keegan Kampschroer, patting the side of the wooden block. Kampschroer is the assistant general manager of the The Eugene, the apartment building hosting the demo, and he was there to show me how to operate the massive hunk of wood. Because—it turns out—Ori needs an operator.

Ori, short for origami, is a robot disguised as plywood furniture. Push a button or dictate a command and the unit, as its name suggests, unfolds itself into a bed or walk-in closet. "There are a couple ways to control the system, but this is the coolest," Kampschroer told me as he turned to an Amazon Echo sitting on a nearby table.

"Hey Alexa, tell Ori to show me the bed," he said.

With a whirr, the bottom of the furniture began to slowly expand like a wooden transformer. After about 20 seconds, a fully made bed jutted into the living room, taking up most of the apartment's once-empty space. "It essentially turns a studio into a one bedroom," Kampschroer said, pressing a button to make the bed disappear.

I was there to give Ori a test ride, in the most literal sense. For the last two years, the company's founders have been working to fine tune the system into something that could be commercialized and mass produced. With its arrival at The Eugene (it's also installed at 12 other luxury residential developments across the country) Ori has finally entered its pilot stage. By the end of the year, the company plans to sell individual units for $10,000 a pop, presumably to real estate developers and people like myself: Young, technologically savvy consumers who live in cramped, urban apartments.

"Millennials are looking for frictionless experiences," Hasier Larrea, one of Ori's co-founders, told me." And Ori, with its automatically vanishing bed and considered app is the epitome of effortless. As someone squarely in its target audience, I was curious to see how I'd like living with robotic furniture. Was chatting with a bookshelf really the wave of the future? Could a shape-shifting storage unit actually make a tiny apartment feel more spacious?

I gave it a go. "Alexa," I said confidently. "Show me the bed." Nothing.

"Tell Ori to show me the bed," Kampschroer corrected.

"Alexa, tell Ori to show me the bed," I repeated, as the bed's motors stirred to life.

Robots, like humans, can be awfully finicky roommates.

Robo History

Before Ori found its way into the high end rental market, it was a research project at the MIT Media Lab's Changing Places group. Six years ago, the group's director, Kent Larson, began thinking about how robotics could make the growing trend of micro living feel less micro. He figured if small spaces felt like big spaces, more people might be inclined to scale down. The reverb effect, he reasoned, would be increased density and decreased strain on cities experiencing booming populations.