Somewhere in New York City there is a cursed vape that occupies Tamagotchi’s soul. If you stop smoking, the digital pet will die. Only engineers who once worked at Anduril, the manufacturer of Meta-Hot weapons, could create such an outrageous machine.
That’s exactly what they did last month at NYU’s stupid hackathon. Stupid hackathons are traditions in the software engineers, hackers and manufacturers space. Every year, people from all over the country come together to use their skills to make very stupid things. Past inventions include a machine that looks like you are angry when you want to get rid of the chatter, selfie stick beer cans and head-mounted shelves, which makes you look like you see through your long gut.
NYU’s Stupid Hackathon was organized by the Interactive Telecom Program at the Tidge School of Arts. It lasted 12 hours, including a table that never stops shaking and a printer that drafted legally binding documents to track the promise of pink. But Tamagotchi of “vape or die” is the beauty of the ball.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzqx2apc9dm
The machine was invented by former Meta employee Rebecca Xun and former Anduril employee Lucia Camacho. They initially thought the machine was a way to help Xun quit smoking. “The initial idea was to do this forever because I wanted to quit the smoke,” Xun told the Washington Square Times. “But it would be more fun and stupid if we use that power and use it to make ourselves more addictive.”
Traditional tamagotchi requires many different kinds of love. It requires watering, feeding, playing and grooming. Users must clean up their stools and balance their various health measures. Xun and Camacho’s digital pets have only one desire: you’ve been bothering with vape. When you don’t, its face fills the screen, huge wet tears shot out from the side of the eyes.
You can see an earlier version of the hackathon student in this video. “It’s very intense,” Camacho said in the video, an animation of the Tamagochi crying script. For the original version of the project, the duo connects the vape to the computer running the digital pet.
Since then, they have iterated and now have a standalone version, although it looks a bit like a C4 brick with a cry on it. They used the pink elf BC5000 vape and tied it to a small screen. The wires extend from the screen to some basic components on the back of the elven pole.
If you stop breathing, it’s the breakout star of a stupid hackathon. Xunn and Camacho have attracted a lot of attention, but Xun tells Futurism that this experience is not all positive. Remember that before the hackathon, she wanted to use digital pets to help her stop smoking. “Because we have tested it so much, we both have tobacco disease,” she said.
