The bewitching wardrobe

They cause physical injury, despair and incurable rage across the Western world, but now the end may be in sight for one of the scourges of modern living. Prepare to say farewell to the Flat Pack blues.

A computer engineer has fitted the seven parts that make up an Ikea wardrobe with sensors in the first step towards a flat pack that tells its owner how to put it together.

Stavros Antifakos, of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology's Department of Perceptual Computing, has fitted the parts of the wardrobe with movement, pressure and distance sensors.

The sensors feed information to a cheap microprocessor, which calculates not only where parts are in relation to each other, but how fast they are moving, and where or how hard they are being pressed.

The processor produces advice and warnings when a mistake is made, via a computer screen to which it is connected by a wireless link, reports New Scientist magazine today.

Eventually, Mr Antifakos hopes to develop a system with built-in sensors. The cheap chips and sensors-would be light-sensitive, so they could start instructing the moment they are out of their box. Put the right pieces together using the correct method and they could utter words such as: "Good, now use that bit of dowel with the ridges to stick on the drawer front."

Assemble them in the wrong order, or the wrong place, or with the wrong method and they shriek: "Bad idea, bad idea," before you've had time to break your thumb or watch the entire project collapse in an incomprehensible heap of match wood.

Alternatively, they could just use lights - green for right, red for wrong. Either way, no more bafflement - No more 2am moments regretting-that 9pm "I'll just do this bit before bed" decision. It would be the end of the disease of Habitatitis, the last of a world in which ruin and perdition come in boxes marked "Ikea".

Those who doubt the need for this should consider another of Mr Antifakos's findings.

There are, he says, 44 ways of starting to assemble an Ikea wardrobe, but only eight work. The remainder lead either to dead ends, or to things that look safe but are not.

It could take more than 10 years for the prices of parts to come down enough to make it economically viable. But it will be worth the wait.