Saturday, March 26, 2005
Clocky, The new torture device
Jax
It looks annoying, like a furry swiss roll on wheels. Even its name is irritating: Clocky. But that's nothing compared with what it does. Clocky is surely the most infuriating wake-up call ever devised.
Dreamt up by a scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it works like this: You hit the snooze button because you are desperate for a few more minutes' sleep. Clocky then rolls off the bedside table and wheels around the bedroom floor bumping into things, before settling on a place to hide.
"When the alarm clock sounds again, the sleeper must get out of bed and search for it," said Gauri Nanda, a research associate at MIT.
"This ensures that the person is fully awake before turning it off."
Ms Nanda hit upon the idea after struggling to rise in the mornings. "I've been known to hit the snooze bar for up to two hours or even accidentally turn it off. I've known people who put the alarm clock in the living room, but then forget to set it before going to sleep.
"Having the alarm clock hide from me was just the most obvious way I could think of to get out of bed."
Ms Nanda gave her clock a furry covering in the hope it would look endearing and stop people throwing it out of the window in anger.
A built-in microprocessor ensures that Clocky rolls off in a new direction and makes a series of different turns, so that its hiding place changes each morning. Because it uses simple technology, MIT says the clock, which has yet to go into production, would cost less than £15.
Ms Nanda has plans to make a second generation of more intelligent Clockies. If two people sharing a room needed to get up at different times, two Clockies could sound different alarms and even gang up on a serial oversleeper by sounding their alarms simultaneously.
Here is the link in case you ever need equipment to take over the world
