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- A new public toilet restoration project in Tokyo has resulted in a transparent toilet that magically blocks people’s view once the door is locked.
- The project was started because people dislike the current public toilets and find them too dark and dirty.
- Transparent toilets also function as lighted lanterns at night.
Public toilets are known for a number of things, and almost all of them are bad. They are usually dirty, smelly, and depending on where they are, crowded. There is nothing worse than having to use the restroom just to locate public restrooms and then walk to see that they are busy.
Tokyo is working to solve some of these problems by renovating dozens of public toilets in the Shibuya district, and they have hired professional architects to paint their own image. The result? The city’s first transparent public toilets and they are much cooler than you might imagine.
The “Tokyo Toilet Project” is an effort by the Nippon Foundation to revitalize commonly used public toilets in Shibuya, and while each location will have its own unique touch, the transparent toilets that have appeared near Yoyogi Fukamachi Mini Park and Haru- no -Ogawa Community Park certainly attracts the most attention from passers-by.
As you can see above, the toilet is covered in clear tinted glass, giving potential bathroom users a clue as to whether or not they are busy. The real trick, however, comes when you close and lock the doors.
No one wants people to watch them while they do their business, and this see-through toilet has a very interesting trick up their sleeves. When you lock the doors, the specialized glass panels turn opaque, preventing anyone from looking inside. When the door is unlocked, the glass becomes transparent again.
“There are two problems with public toilets, especially those located in parks,” says the Nippon Foundation. “The first is whether it’s clean inside, and the second is that no one is secretly waiting inside. Using new technology, we made the exterior walls with glass that turns opaque when the lock is closed, so that a person can check inside before entering. At night, they light up the parks like a beautiful lantern.
The idea here is that since the toilet is transparent when a person leaves, people will leave it as clean as when they found it. Plus, they’re just cool to look at, and the fact that they glow at night should give passers-by extra comfort as there is no one hiding inside waiting to mug them.
Whether the right people in Tokyo will decide that this new and improved toilet is worth using remains to be seen, but I can’t imagine why anyone wouldn’t want to spend some time there.
Mike Wehner has reported on technology and video games for the past decade, covering the latest news and trends in virtual reality, wearable devices, smartphones, and future technologies. Most recently, Mike served as a technical writer at The Daily Dot and has been featured on USA Today, Time.com, and countless other websites and print. His love of reporting comes right after his gambling addiction.
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