There is a cursed vape somewhere in NYC that holds the soul of a tamagotchi. If you stop vaping, the digital pet dies. Only engineers who have worked for meta and weapon manufacturer Anduril can create a machine so harmful.
And that's exactly what they did in the annual Nyu Stupid hackathon last month. Bobo hackathons are a tradition in the software engineer, hackers, and manufacturer's space. Every year across the country people gather to use their skills to do dumb things. Past inventions include a machine that makes you happy that you are annoyed by yourself when you want to get out of the small conversation, a selfie stick for a beer can, and a head -mounted rack that looks like you can see through a long intestinal tract.
The Nyu Stupid Hackathon is organized by the interactive telecommunication program at the Tisch School of the Arts. It continues for 12 hours and includes creations such as a table that does not stop shaking and a draft draft legal binding documents to monitor rose promises. But the “vape or die” tamagotchi is the ball of the ball.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZQX2APC9DM
The machine is the invention of former META employee Rebecca Xun and former Anduril employee Lucia Camacho. They originally conceived a machine as a way to help Xun stop vaping. “Originally, the idea was to do it for good, because I wanted to stop vaping,” Xun told Washington Square Times. “But it is more fun and more stupid if we use this power and use it for evil and make myself more addicted.”
A traditional tamagotchi requires many different types of love. It needs to be watery, feeding, playing, and getting married. Users need to clean its poops and balance different health meters. Xun and Camacho's digital pets have just one desire: that you keep the vape. When you don't, its face fills the screen and a huge wet tears shoot the side of its eyes.
You can see an early version of the machine in this video from NYU students a hackathon. “It's so intense,” Camacho said in the video as an animation of Tamagotchi crying playing on the screen. For the original version of the project, the duo connected a vape to a computer that ran a digital pet.
They have been in the past and have now a version with its own that even looks a bit like a C4 brick with a crying cartoon on it. They used a pink ELF bar BC5000 vape and strapped a small screen here. The wires run from the screen to some main ingredients behind the elf bar.
The Tamaogtchi who dies if you stop puffing is the BOBO hackathon's breakout star. Xunn and Camacho got a lot of attention, but Xun told futurism that the experience was not positive. Remember, before the hackathon he wanted to use a digital pet to help him stop vaping. “Because we tried it so much, we were both sick from vaping,” he said.
