Wednesday 19 September 2007

科学技術 Technology

Its time to write about technology in Japan. You have surly heard stereotypes about a technology mania in Japan, with one or another example like the famous interactive panel toilet example.
Well what should I say, I guess it's true.

便所 Toilet

Toilets I encountered so far could do the following crazy stuff:
- clean your but with water beams
- dry your water cleaned ass with a dryer
- (pre)warm the toilet seat
- let you adjust the temperature of water, and seat, resp. the power of the dryer
- music to drown out human toilet noises (mainly for females)
- music of flowing water to make the pee come out more easily (mainly at urinals)





黒板/白板 White Board

We have white boards at the company, which we use for meetings , planing and brain storming. They are just like ordinary white boards, with one difference (or two). There is a "Print" button on it. So last meeting, when we discovered that button we tried it out and what happened was that the white board paper was scanned completely and then printed out on a nearby printer.
The other difference is that you can insert SD flash cards to save the current table state.



a printout from our white board sketching

寿司屋 Sushi Restaurant

We have a Sushi restaurant close to our working place the AXT Main Tower. It is called 吃驚寿司, which means surprise sushi (pretty scary name, imo). It looks pretty ordinary and I did not find anything special until we were to pay our bills. Side remark: eating Sushi is pretty cheap, when being vegetarian, since the few vegetable ones are very cheap.
Anyway the 寿司 came on little plates, and we already wondered how they could determine who ate what. Especially since it was also a 回転寿司, meaning there are 寿司 moving along a certain road next to the tables and you can just pick them up (instead or ordering). Well in the end the lady came with a scanner and held it over each piles of plates and printed the bill. So there were actually magnetic readable materials inside the porcelain plates, which could be read out to determine the price. =)

1 comment:

Unknown said...

you missed it the last year, but there were even more technology in the sushi place!!
They used to have a touch screen attached to the edge of all the tables. All you had to do was to press the image that seemed good to you, order the quantity and 3mins later the guy would bring the food.
Somehow they replaced it by ordinary written orders.
Ask Randy, he probably has pictures of this