I suppose, one advantage would be that you can use it while almost asleep, while you need a minimum of mental presence for a shower. So if you wanted, you could: wake up; slump into the bathroom and into this thing; press the button; snooze another 15 minutes while part of your morning routine is being done for (or to) you.

Whether this is something you should do is another question...

(Also, it might be possible to extend it with hair washing if you mount one of those barber sinks at the top and then somehow automate it. Exercise left for the reader.)

You are right that for able bodied people it's at best a gimmick. But it might be useful for people with limited mobility, who don't want to depend on other people washing them.

For a man sure, you can do your hair in 2 minutes. But if you’re a woman it is going to be a multiple of 15 minutes.

Ouch, the germicidal UVC is even more hazardous than the UVA and UVB tanning rays!

And uses orders of magnitude more water

Instead, it’s a quirky look at the technological optimism of the '70s

I thought it would be about clothes washing machines, but designed to be easily used by people.

Do we have to complain about the title of every single post here?

> those beautiful times when people actually cared and believed the future will be better.

David Graeber has written eloquently about this

https://davidgraeber.org/articles/of-flying-cars-and-the-dec...

Today, we would instead make an app that would matchmake important people, who desire to be effortlessly washed, with less-than-important people, who are willing to wash others for less than a minimum wage. It's sharing (and caring) economy!

We would also call this a "minimum viable product" and promise that in some future update, the less-than-important people involved will be replaced by AI (and become even less important).

> Ah, those beautiful times when people actually cared and believed the future will be better

Thinking the future will be worse with all the available evidence is of a huge ego. How main character you have to be to think that it's just as you're alive that a trend of millenia will inverse.

And it would interrupt the cycle every few minutes with an ad.

Just look at the old design/production and the new one. Japan has simply regressed in design and manufacturing. I'll not pretend that I know why, and I don't think anybody does. But they had a nice run during which they got "dreamy" about the future and then... the bubble burst.

Here hoping that China gives us another run since the US of A has decided the take the back seat, financialize everything and put MBA/Bureaucrats in every corner of the process.

I don’t think we’ve lost the willingness to test products that push human/mechanical boundaries. I think rather it is about not retreading on the learned boundaries that we’ve already established or “solved”. So now we see concepts that test different kinds of human/machine integration. Such as worn AI devices, headsets, and the future idea of brain chips.

As for automatic washers: The idea isn’t totally gone - enclosed automated pet washers are around. (Despite being clearly terrifying for some pets.)

we have actual adaptive beds that auto adjust your position, firmness, temperature and fully monitor your sleep to improve it.

But they sure don't have a funky 70s style design, perhaps that's the part that's missing for most people ?

Reminds me the early periods of personal computers.

It’s interesting to consider how our priorities have shifted

>cleaning-intensity ultrasound could cause issues for humans?

Apart from it being loud as fuck? (They say it's ultrasonic, but there's some harmonic around 15,000 Hz that they all exhibit for some reason- both the bucket cleaners and the plaque picks at the dentist's office- and if you can still hear that frequency it is quite unpleasant.)

Most of the cleaning action of this thing is just mechanically being sprayed; I think they threw the ultrasonic cleaning action in just because they could. I'm sure it makes you feel cleaner though.

Yes, that and the start of the 1999 Chinese film shower

https://youtu.be/pxeOQVBLcvM?si=_g0_cHz4LPliGuMR&t=59

You are in luck. If you attend the Osaka Expo next year. You can see the updated version.

https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/15482351

15 minutes and no hair-washing

There was a similar (contemporary?) Japanese model shared on here a few days ago, which was basically the same sans ladder. As long as there's nothing to stumble over on your way in, and it's not too hard to get situated in the chair, one of those would be amazing for people with mobility issues.

There was a New Yorker short story I read years ago about an elderly woman in a nursing home, and this wasn't the point of the story at all, but the main thing I remember is how the woman wanted to live with her daughter until her daughter pointed out that assisted/accessible bathing would be impossible in the daughter's tiny apartment shower.

It fills with (hot) water up to the neck, which feels like a huge risk for unattended disabled people

I would be mightily surprised if the independence of disabled people were even a thought in the 70s.

Mount the phone on the top in front of your head. Every day alternate which arm you wash, and which one you scroll with.

How are you browsing HN in the shower?

At my high school it was a large tiled room with stainless steel columns in the middle. Each column had 6 showerheads around the top. Basically no matter which way you stood, it was full monty exposure to/from almost everyone else in the room.

Oh wow, where was this?

If I would have to guess Soviet Russia?

Our Miele washing machine isn't too bed, if you ever had even a brief look at the manual.

The main annoyance I can find is that it's overly cautious about when it lets you open the door. I guess they take mild annoyance and waiting for the user, over Miele being responsible for major water spills.

On/off would do! Just make delicate 30C all the things. If you need sterilization, use a powder that does that.

> gender neutral pronoun

I can't speak for the author, but it can just be easier to just go for a more impersonal tone.

At no point do you need to keep in my the gender of the people and the writing is a lot clearer (the models being women has no impact on the subject, which is the machine, so it's noise in this case)

Hypercorrection.

I think it's historically been OK to refer to any person using they/them/their. More recently, even in progressive circles I think, it's still OK as long as you don't have information about the person's preference that would make neutral pronouns offensive to them. Basically, it's fine until you know it's not.

It's true that all the supporting pictures in the article are of women, and you're likely right that all the demonstration models were probably women. But the machine is not gender-specific, the process of using it doesn't seem like it would be gender-specific, and the author was generalizing a series of demonstrations instead of a specific demonstration with a specific model. The subject of the sentences/paragraph you're concerned about - 'the demonstration model' - is itself gender neutral. For all of these reasons I think it makes sense why they/them pronouns were used here. Not strange or controversial at all.

I interpreted that sentence as meaning that someone else would set the water temperature?

I don't know if all the models were women, perhaps they had some guys as well? (Or the author just doesn't want to commit, because they don't know?)

We see some pictures of models, but we don't know if those are all the models they had.

If it works anything like a modern dishwasher, it would use less water than a normal bath or shower.

It doesn’t matter. Really doesn’t.

We are talking about a device from 50 years ago where concerns were wildly different than the ones today. Water was cheap and plentiful.

I think you can just buy them in japan.

I've had this vision where we create a niche in a building for restroom placement by fork lift. For the low end ones the interior can be 3d printed melted down and recycled. They can be pressure washed with high pressure steam.

For the high end ones you can have the marble finish with gold trimmings then when it tickles your fancy have it replaced with a different color marble, different light and different ornaments.

You can do various lease formulas where you get to enjoy the fancy designs until you [need to] downgrade to the economy version.

That formula could also allow exotic designs that wouldn't sell as permanent installations. You could have a different marvel character theme every week/month while you wait for the steam punk and Victorian units to become available. Star wars, startrek etc. I mean, you wouldn't want a ycombinator themed restroom permanently but for a week or~so it would be hilarious.

https://google.com/search?q=themed+restroom&udm=2

Paying someone with a mop and broom minimum wage to clean the bathrooms and everything else is always going to be more cost effective.

You aren't making money on customers or employees using the toilet so there's no incentive for investment beyond the bare minimum. Businesses wouldn't have bathrooms at all if it were legal.

They exist: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanisette

I mean, washing isn't some kind of profoundly enjoyable experience, is it? The soaking in hot water is what feels good, and this lets you do that without any of the annoying scrubbing and such.

On solid objects at least (like jewelry) it dislodges particles of grime / dirt. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrasonic_cleaning. No idea if this also works on soft tissue.

Edit: the Wikipedia page above says "the ultrasonic action is relatively benign to living tissue but can cause discomfort and skin irritation.". So maybe it was just a gimmick. Ultrasound cleaning was fairly new at the time, so maybe it sounded modern.

I think that's the reason why it didn’t catch on

It depends on the frequency, intensity, and duration of the ultrasound.

Which probably aren't documented for the ultrasonic cleaners.

Plus "if you don't know, play it safe".

They probably wanted to keep you from making a mess. (And perhaps also wanted to mess with you.)