The Workbay Chair is designed by Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec for Vitra, and comes with a high backrest that acts as blinders for the user. It's hoodie-like top gives you the feeling of being cut off, acoustically and visually, from the rest of your surroundings. Awesome. No price listed. [Design Blog]

And when you stand up it lifts itself up behind your behind to aid you getting vertical: assistance you'll presumably need if you're so very relaxed in the chair when seated. I'm not sure how this is different from a regular hydraulic chair mount in practice, however.

Unlike the Robot Leg, which is motorized and capable of jumping, the Leopard chair utilizes the geometry of the Leg, but is unpowered. So it won't rise up and start kicking human butt when the robot revolution comes. It is made of carbon fiber, though.

Sadly this material might not make it into the final for-sale product, which Oki is hoping to release in May of 2009. [Tech-on]

The degrees of separation go thusly:

The xten chair is the spawn of Pininfarina, an Italian design firm. Pininfarina designs many things, like cell phones and alarm clocks, but chief among them is the ultra-rare Ferrari Enzo. Eriksson is probably best known for wrecking his Enzo on a highway, sawing it in half, and walking away relatively OK so he could continue to make shitty portable gaming devices. And scene.

We have no idea whether or not Eriksson has an xten in his office, but if he does, we're certain its days, like Gizmondo's, are numbered.

[xten via DVICE]

Wireless connection
8-channel 2.4GHz digital transmitter
Full-range channel digital selector
LCD display
2 x full-range speakers with blue LEDs
Gas piston height and tilting seat adjustments
4-5 hours battery life
Headrest
Fully-functioning lady.

Erm, I might have made that last one up, actually. The Pyramat Gaming Chair 2.1 will set you back $289.95. [The Sharper Image]

After grinding our rears into it for hours and hours on end, we came to the conclusion that it's a fantastic office chair in itself, but the bonus of being able to become a great tray and floor chair for gaming makes it even more worthwhile.

We tested both the faux leather and the fabric version, and although some people prefer fabric, we enjoyed the softness and smoothness of the faux leather. More than two of our friends also told us that we should always go with faux leather because they're a lot easier to clean if you spill stuff on it. Strange that everyone we talked to had that same suggestion—what are we, clumsy or something?

When the TreyChair is in office mode, you can barely tell that it has the ability to Optimus Prime into something more. It comes with the standard tilt controls, height adjustment, and five wheels that all office tasks chairs come with.

It gets really interesting when you grab the switch on the back of the chair, lift up the seat and separate the two like the saucer and engine section of the Enterprise D. The seat becomes a rocking chair for the floor, which is fantastic for doing stuff at ground level. The wheels become a tray, which is probably where the name TreyChair came from. The tray is height adjustable and can easily slip in between the rockers of your chair if you want to get in close for some work on your laptop.

With the chair in separation mode, you can pretty much use it for a stool, a footrest, or anything you can come up with (like sexy-time, but we didn't test that).

All in all, the price of $239 for the fabric and $269 for faux leather makes this a not-too-expensive solution to your chair needs if you need a chair for both the office and the living room. – Jason Chen

Product Page [TreyChair]

What we want to know is, does this chair have a back, or is it just a beanbag on top of the frame? Because without a back, this is just a bean-bag on a stool — make one yourself for fifty bucks.

Out of Office [Marie Louise Gustafsson via Design Spotter]