Things I like about this concept:
- No more bending down to try and see if there are feet by a toilet seat in order to know if a public toilet is occupied.
- ^Conversely, no heart rate spike if you’re sitting in a public toilet, and someone aggressively tries to open the door, leaving you to pray that the flimsy lock that is already barely hanging on will have enough strength to stop an awkward social interaction*.
Things I don’t like about this concept:
- I struggle just getting a motion sensor sink or soap dispenser to work. Honest to God it actually makes me think the rumors of gingers being soul-less is true. I can stand there for MINUTES sometimes, desperately waving my hands like an air traffic controller, attempting to get 3-4 seconds of water out of a motion sensor sink. So if I have trouble with that, I would be petrified that this ‘fogging’ technology wouldn’t work. Or, God forbid, it stops working while you’re seated and still in the….ahhh….shall we say, ‘process.’ Could you imagine that walk to the door to try and get it to fog up again? No thanks.
- If you put me in a bathroom, and it’s completely private, and I have my phone, I may stay there all day. I might fall asleep. Sometimes the pressure of the public restroom actually motivates you to get the hell out of there and get on with your day. If it’s clean, and comfortable, why would I leave?
- I understand the idea of being able to see the cleanliness of the toilet before you have to enter it, but there’s just something about opening the door on an unoccupied public toilet and not knowing what state it’s going to be in that makes you feel alive. Ever carefully opened a stall door at a rest stop on I-80 in Indiana? Electric. Will it be clean(ish)? Will it looked like someone exploded? Who knows!
Anyway, kind of interesting technology coming out of Japan. I’m surprised Kohler’s hands weren’t involved in this.
PS: You don’t see them often anymore, but remember these things in bar bathrooms?
Imagine these in a Coronavirus world. Yikes.
