Pee-Powered Gaming Console Launches in UK

UK’s Captive Media has today launched the world’s first urine powered video game. The game allows bar patrons in south London to compete for high scores every time they spend a penny. The gaming consoles are installed above urinals at the Exhibit bar in Balham. The two brains behind this idea is Gordon MacSween and Mark Melford, the owners Captive Media (a gamed development company).

Speaking to thinq_, Gordon and Mark say that the idea was inspired by an “apocryphal story they’d heard about cleaning costs being reduced at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport after owners etched a tiny image of a fly in the bottom of the urinals – causing customers to improve their aim and reaping, it’s said, an 80 per cent reduction in ‘spillage’.”

So an eye-level video screen is mounted above the urinals and fitted with infra-red sensors to detect urine. The infra-red is installed at the base of the urinals so that it would respond to the heat of pee.

Watch the video of the Demo;

[youtube width=”620″ height=”450″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLQoh8YCqo4[/youtube]

Mark and Gordon told UK tech blog Thinq_ that “they investigated a number of technologies, including ultrasound and even fluorescence – which they dismissed, they said, when they realised users would need to eat a lot of spinach for their urine to contain the requisite levels of Vitamin B.”

The gaming console operation is completely hands-free ensuring utmost hygiene while the interface is also crafted in a way that users would not think that they need to use their hands to operate the console.

The console has an internet connection to allow gamers to log in via their cell phones and compete on score tables with other gamers. Users would soon be able to share and compare their scores with other patrons in bars across the UK as the idea is being rolled out far and wide.

“It has taken three years of research and development to get to this point,” says Mark Melford told thinq. “The reaction to the units so far has been incredible – it’s just much fun.”

The developers also discovered that women sneaked to try and catch a glimpse of how the men were doing so the company is developing a hand-operated version to entertain customers queueing for the ladies’ with a pub quiz called,  ‘Clever Dick‘.