Sørvin, Slaatto and Kronick hope that their high-tech mobile home will one day be affordable for the average person. To that end, they've assembled a manual of their project; so with the right tools, the right upholstery, and the right programming algorithms, this hexagonal spider-dwelling could be yours.

Kronick, who designed the inverse kinematics software that controls the six-legged house, has high hopes for the design:

Kronick says he would love to test the walking house in Africa with a herd of elephants, and has ideas about an amphibious version that can float on water as well as walk on land.

"We plan to make the house walk well and reliably enough that you could program a set of GPS waypoints via the onboard computer, remotely from an iPhone or over the internet through a Google Maps interface or similar, and have the house follow that path," he says.

Sounds convenient, but going over to a friend's house for dinner will now involve a whole new level of complexity. Whose dinner table should you set? How do you stop the kids from running back to their own house to play video games in the middle of the evening? At the end of the night, when you decide it's too late to start a long housewalk elsewhere, will your new neighbors hear you through the window as you deconstruct the evening? And God help us all if you accidentally hit the wrong GPS bookmark and show up at your parents' house instead.

A House That Walks [via Popular Science], Manual for micro dwellings [N55]