Thursday, January 20, 2011

Toylet video games help Japanese men aim straight

A Japanese entertainment company has combined men's obsession with video games with their perennial inability to aim straight to create a range of distractions in selected Tokyo urinals. Sega has installed the Toylets in male lavatories at four bars and games arcades in the Japanese capital.

The games use pressure sensors attached to eye-level LCD screens that test users' accuracy as they answer the call of nature. The four games include one in which the object is to spray the screen clean of graffiti. Another, Manneken Pis, named after the famous statue in Brussels, measures the volume of the urine stream.


YouTube link.

Splashing Battle, meanwhile, pits one user against another – though thankfully not directly – by challenging him to produce a more powerful stream than the previous visitor. In the fourth game, the North Wind and the Sun and Me, sensors control a digital wind blowing up a young woman's skirt. The greater the stream's intensity, the higher the skirt travels.

Sega said the Toylet games would be available only until the end of the month, and it had no plans to market them commercially. Household versions would be unlikely to succeed. According to a 2009 survey by Toto, more than 33% of Japanese men prefer to urinate while sitting down.

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