Sega's Toylets: A Game You Play While Using the Bathroom

Japanese toilets were already famous for heated seats, posterior shower jets, and perfume bursts. In December 2010, Sega went further: the games company installed urine-controlled video games in Tokyo urinals.

Each "Toylet" urinal was fitted with a pressure sensor, with a small digital display mounted at eye level. Four games were offered during a test run — in the men's rooms of four pubs and game arcades around Tokyo — including "Graffiti Eraser," in which the player aims to erase virtual graffiti on the screen, and a stream-strength contest that measured the player's flow and compared it with the previous user's. Digital advertisements played after each game, which was, after all, the point of the exercise: a novel medium for reaching a captive audience.

The test was scheduled to end in January 2011, with Sega weighing a commercial rollout. Whether the Toylets ever graduated beyond publicity stunt to product hardly mattered; they remain the perfect artifact of an era when Japan's electronics industry was still confidently inventing new interfaces — even for the bathroom.