A team of robotics researchers at Apple have designed and prototyped a lamp-like robot with lifelike movements, according to a blog post and accompanying video published last month on the Apple Machine Learning Research website. The lamp, which reminds one of the cute Pixar mascot Luxo Jr., may hint at Apple’s future plans. The project is called ELEGNT: Expressive and Functional Movement Design for Non-Anthropomorphic Robot.

The tabletop robot would be primarily controlled with Siri and Apple Intelligence. The device could respond to commands such as “look at me,” which would position the screen on the user’s face during a FaceTime video call. The device would also understand different voices.

The project page is on the Apple website and the paper is on Arxiv.org.

See the video below and more on Sixcolors and MacRumors.