Are children enticing? - Yes, they do.
Dark? - Absolutely.
Foolish? - Absolutely crazy.
A joke? - Fortunately, yes.
With colourful designs and candy-like flavours, e-cigarettes have been criticised for years for appealing to children and young people. The more serious side of the vaping world has long been up in arms - because these visual and flavour choices undermine the fight against restrictions and bans, often justified by the desire to protect minors from nicotine.
And with "friends" like Vape-o-Gotchi - a clear reference to the classic Japanese toy Tamagotchi - the industry hardly needs any enemies. It's shooting itself in the foot.
A Tamagotchi on vapour
Vape-o-Gotchi is in all its simplicity an e-cigarette connected to a small screen where a digital pet "lives". But only as long as you keep taking puffs. If you stop, your little friend of binary code will lie down and die.
Inventors Rebecca Xun and Lucia Camacho are behind the idea.
The twist - which many media outlets have overlooked in their reporting - is that the invention shell be foolish. That's the whole point.
Vape-o-Gotchi was created for the "Stupid Hackathon" event at New York University - a competition where the goal is to build the most pointless and silly technological solutions possible.
From smoking cessation tool to satirical concept
According to Lucia Camacho, who spoke to Mail Online, the project actually started as a tool to help people stop vaping. In the original version, if you started using your e-cigarette, your pet died - a kind of reverse psychology, or "parental control over yourself", as Camacho puts it.
But when the duo started reworking the idea for Stupid Hackathon, they took a darker, more ironic approach - where you shell weapon to keep the animal alive. According to them, it became both more entertaining and more appropriate for the competition.
"It's a little more fun to be evil," says Lucia Camacho.
Simple technique, big viral effect
The device itself consists of a regular Elf Bar - a popular disposable vapouriser - connected to a small screen, a simple computer and a sensor that detects when the vapour is used. Depending on how often the user vapes, the animation of the little pet changes. The battery level of the vape also has an impact on the "health" of the animal.
The invention is not for sale - and never will be. But naturally, it has attracted a lot of attention on social media. Some take the joke to heart and write that they would love to own one, while others misunderstand the concept and get upset.
Satire meets misinformation
"Unfortunately, this is not surprising. E-cigarettes have been controversial for almost 20 years. Government information about the technology is often inadequate - sometimes downright misleading - and this creates a breeding ground for people to believe anything," says Stefan Mathisson, editor-in-chief of VapeCheck and the Swedish platform Road hill.
"It's rare to read about vaping as a smoking cessation tool - even though that's how most people use e-cigarettes today," he adds.
