How about a small virtual pet that requires you to puff on your vejp to survive?
Attractive to children? - Very much so.
Dark? - Yep.
Stupid? - Something incredible.
A joke? - Yes, fortunately.
With often colourful appearances and candy-like flavours, e-cigarettes have long been criticised for attracting children and young people. Much of the more serious vejp world has long recognised the counterproductive nature of hubba bubba designs and the like when fighting against laws and bans, which are often introduced precisely to protect minors from nicotine.
Well - with "friends" like Vape-o-Gotchin, a reflection of the classic Japanese toy Tamagotchi, no enemies are needed. It sort of sets itself up for failure.
A Tamagotchi on nicotine
In Vape-o-Gotchi simply connects an e-cigarette to a small screen where the digital pet 'lives'. But only as long as you keep taking puffs. If you stop, your little friend made of ones and zeros will lie down and die.
Inventors Rebecca Xun and Lucia Camacho are behind the idea.
But - the twist, which has been missed in a lot of reporting, is that it MUST be stupid. That's the whole idea.
Vape-o-Gotchin was created for the 'Stupid Hackathon' event at New York University - a competition to build the stupidest inventions possible.
From anti-smoking tool to satire
The idea actually began as a tool to help people stop vejpa, Lucia Camacho tells Mail Online magazine. In the original version of the invention, if you started vejpa, the pet died - a kind of reverse psychology in the style of "parental control on yourself", as Camacho puts it.
But when the duo started adapting their contribution to the Stupid Hackathon, they thought a darker version - where you must vejpa to keep their digital animal alive - suited the competition better. And more fun it was, according to them:
"It's a bit more fun to be evil," says Lucia Camacho.
Simple technology, big impact
The device itself consists of a regular Elf Bar - a popular disposable e-cigarette - connected to a small screen, a simple computer and a sensor that detects when the vejp is used. Depending on whether the user puffs or not, the animation of the small pet on the screen changes. The "health" of the animals is also affected by the charge level of the vejpen.
The invention is not for sale - and never intended to be. But it has, of course, caused quite a stir on social media. Many are getting in on the joke and writing about how desperately they want one, while others are missing all but the headlines and are horrified.
While it is unclear whether Rebecca Xun and Lucia Camacho had any higher purpose than to be a bit "wickedly funny" with their invention, some argue that it still raises some serious questions. How are nicotine products marketed? Where is the line between irony and advertising? Aren't there unscrupulous companies that could actually do this for real?
