http://abcnews.go.com/sections/scite...ame030620.html
A Gee Whiz Game
Students Create Video Game Fun — for Urinals
By Andy Jordan, Tech Live
June 20— Hold on to your joysticks, men. There's finally a video game where you don't have to stop playing to go to the bathroom.
In fact, with this game you can't play unless you go to the bathroom. Literally.
You're in Control is a game developed around the art of keeping urination where it belongs: in the urinal. And its creators, two Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers, believe it's more than a tinkle trainer — it's also for breaking down social barriers.
"With this system you can mark your digital territory since you can no longer mark your physical territory, because of all of our sanitation codes and social mores," says the game's co-creator, Dan Maynes-Aminzade ("Monzy" for short), a research assistant at MIT's Media Lab in Cambridge, Mass.
Fellow researcher and creator Hayes Solos Raffle describes the game even more succinctly.
"We wanted to bring some of the fun back into peeing," he says.
Hamsters Help Aim?
The idea is to use the force and direction of a urination stream to control icons on a video screen directly above the urinal.
"The game is based on the popular arcade game 'Whack-A-Mole,' where moles pop up and you try to hit them. Instead, now you're peeing on them … and they're hamsters instead of moles," Monzy says with a chuckle.
Both men say that although they're not trying to reinvent the social order surrounding public urination, there are practical uses for the device.
"If you look at any men's restroom… there are usually splashes all over the walls and floor," Maynes-Aminzade says.
"It's a well-documented problem," Solos Raffle adds, "and there's even history of devices to help men aim better."
Water Weapon
Wanting to demonstrate the system in public and being careful not to exclude those without the necessary equipment (i.e. women), the two came up with a game device.
"We made this strap-on controller that's actually a garden hose nozzle attached to some water reservoirs that I squeeze to pressurize [and] use to squirt water at the urinal as if I was actually peeing," Maynes-Aminzade explains.
The two men designed the device using an array of sensors placed in the back of the urinal. Wires route up through the plumbing, through the flush handle, and into sensor inputs on a microcontroller that processes the signal and sends it to a PC laptop wired to the back of the installation.
Maynes-Aminzade wrote the software for the game in C++. "I programmed a series of interactive games that run in Windows and operate on a fairly low-end laptop," he says.
Mark of a Moneymaker?
The duo is already thinking about marketing the game to arcades and recreation-themed restaurants such as Jillian's and Dave & Buster's.
"This could improve sanitation because people are encouraged to aim, and could drive drink sales," Maynes-Aminzade says. "People will drink more beer so they can go back and break the high score. They can take the gaming right into the bathroom with them and keep on gaming."
The men are also working on a networked multiplayer game. "I think that would produce an interesting social phenomenon whereas now only women go to the bathroom in groups, men might start going to the bathroom in groups as well to get a new high score," Maynes-Aminzade says. "It really would be a pissing contest."
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Actually - it sounds pretty damn cool - but quite ridiculous too. I like the last remark about the pissing contest.
