Our own founder and CTO has a temporary living quarters above our research lab, and requested our engineers design for him a special privacy enhancing bathtub. Because he's under a lot of stress, he frequently unplugs his phone for privacy, and takes long baths to just unwind from the stress of his job. Below is his request for his own private bathroom, which we have begun to build. This design will form the basis for a new line of commercial SafetySpa line of jaccuzzis for large upscale commercial installations where cost is no object, and user satisfaction is of the utmost importance.
you know i've heard of glass bottom boats? or like, you know, they have those big glass dishes for industrial chemical use. well it's not hard to imagine finding one in the shape of a bathtub. so picture a bathtub made of clear glass. it's not hard to imagine installing that up in my private bathroom on the second floor, right above our research division. since the tub would be mounted in a whole cut in the floor, i would be able to see any people down below, who would look up at me and wave at me, while i was sitting in the tub. i think i would find this distracting, so in order to protect my privacy (the right to be left alone), the glass could be tinted, smoked, greyglass or the like, so that it would be dark, like the back windows to a caddilac or limousine. since the folks in the research division tend to keep the room dark, save for the faint glow of their computer monitors, and since i like my bathroom well lit, i couldn't see down into the room below, but anyone there could look up and see into the tub. because the tub would be concave from my side, there is no way that i could angle my head to look through it, even if i wanted to. to me, it would look no different than would any black fiberglass bathtub, but to them, it would look like a clear glass tub. that way i could bathe in total privacy, since i could not see anyone down below. privacy is the right to be left alone, and is particularly important in a bathroom, especially in a bathtub, which is perhaps the last bastion of quiet tranquility where a person can be alone to relax and think, being removed from telephones, televisions, the hustle and bustle of traffic, and the deluge of junk mail and telephone solicitors constantly violating our personal privacy. thus it would be extremely important to me that i not see the people down below, lest i be disturbed or distracted from my deep personal thoughts while enjoying a nice hot bath, all alone. it would be good if they could see me, though, because seeing how a typical user uses products they have designed, would help them design the products better. that way they might bring me an improved faucet, or a better drain stopper system, as they watched my usage patterns.
most of the day the people below would just see up through an empty bathtub. if it was a jaccuzi, it could be full of water even when i wasn't using it, so that they'd see into the empty bathroom in an almost surreal sort of way, with the distortion of the water, something like when you're underwater in a pool, looking through a diving mask, up into the world above.
the reason for the semi transparency of the tub would be so that sensors could be installed behind the glass, down below. accordingly, there would be no taps or controls on my tub. if it was empty, it would begin to fill, automatically when the sensors detected i had sat down in it. if it was the kind of tub that's aways full (like a jaccuzzi), perhaps the jets would turn on automatically when i sat down in it.
it would also protect me from drowning, because there would be various sensors that would sense if i'd, for example, fallen asleep and started to drift down under the water. it might sound a loud buzzer to wake me up, or alert someone who would come upstairs to pull me out of the water. maybe there would also be a video camera above the tub, wired into a remote monitoring site, so that my bathing could be monitored, at times when there was nobody down below, for my continued safety. the video camera would be in a dark smoked plexiglass dome so that i could not see it moving, or see which way it was pointing, or which part of me it was zoomed in on. this would be very important to me because otherwise it might violate my privacy by distracting me from my deep thoughts. i think seeing a moving object above me would make me feel that i were not alone, and privacy is the right to be left alone.
this sort of technology could go a long way to improved convenience, accident prevention and increased safety, while at the same time ensuring total privacy in the bathroom.