If you're old enough, you'll remember the old Pixar Films starting video of a lamp jumping and looking at the audience, as presented below. Steve Jobs owned Pixar.

Well, Apple's latest robot project is like the Pixar lamp as presented in Apple's video below. The project is called "ELEGNT: Expressive and Functional Movement Design for Non-Anthropomorphic Robot."  

Well before Apple's smart robotic lamp video came to light, Patently Apple covered two Apple patents (01 and 02) that illustrated a lamp device/projector as noted in the patent Figures below.

The patents discussed both a "Spatial Light System" and a projector. In one patent Apple's engineers note that "The projector may be mounted in a housing such as a lamp housing, a furniture housing, a standalone projector housing, and/or any other suitable housing." So beyond a cute lamp, Apple envisions adding a projection system.

The patent also noted that if the user is playing a game on the surface of a table and is speaking during the game, the microphone may detect the user's voice and control circuitry may use speech recognition techniques to determine what the user is saying. If voice input indicates that the user is building a battleship, the control circuitry may use the projector to create a battleship shadow using unilluminated regions.

Seeing the smart lamp in Apple's video in context with Apple's patents gives the project a much deeper meaning and reality. One patent dated back to August 2023. That patent was originally filed with USPTO back in June 16, 2022. Once again, patents were well ahead of what's made public – and in this case provides us with much added information about its projector feature and more.   

You could read Apple's Human-Computer Interaction paper on the smart lamp / Robotic lamp here.