Monday, March 21, 2011

Welcome to The FUTURE!

When I was walking out of an MRT station (Metro Rail Transit - Like London's Underground) in Taipei this sign caught my eye:


Why yes, that is in fact an LED indicator board to tell you the status of the stalls in the men's room.  No more of that pesky furtive glancing under the stall wall or embarrassing rattling of locked doors.  Indeed, this was out IN THE MAIN HALL, so you didn't even need to go into the restroom to know what was available.  This truly is an amazing time in which we live.

Seriously though, this got sorted into the bin in my brain labelled "Huh?"
 - Is it useful and cool, or just kind of creepy?
 - Who created this?  It obviously took a great deal of doing.  SOMEONE has this thing on their resume.
 - Why is this the first time I've ever seen it?  Is it really new?  Or a pilot run?  Or somebody's college art project?

Anyway, I thought it was interesting, enough so to stop in a busy train station and take a photo of a restroom sign.  What do YOU think?  Have you ever seen one of these before?  Comment below.

2 comments:

Fuzzlizard said...

what's the red light mean? "The last dude just dropped a deuce in here...wait for another stall!" ? Now, that would be useful to know... ;)

Anonymous said...

Someone paid for that. Someone sat down and designed it. And while they used LEDs and the housing probably wasn't too expensive, it looked reasonably durable.

But where are the sensors? Pressure? Or light? Or (umm) displacement? Exactly how can they be sure the stall is open or closed?

What is the failure rate: do they bias in favor of false positives or (horror) false negatives?

So many questions...