At first sight, the Laughing Swing is a regular swing and has to be used as such. When you sit on it, it chuckles. As you swing, it laughs, and the higher you go, the harder it laughs. At the peak swinging it is laughing wildly.

It is a cycle: the person, by swinging, makes the swing laugh, and this laughter causes the person to laugh back (and watching the video on the website made me laugh as well. Irresistible!)

The swing’s laugh was chosen after auditioning a variety of different “laughers�.

How it works: a sensor attached to the rope determines the degree of swinging; a microcontroller collects the sensor data and constructs the laugher curve in real time. Finally, a speaker embedded in the seat plays the laughing sounds.

Michal Rothschild and Michal Rinott created the Swing for Geekcon, a conference -organized by Yossi Vardi– that gathers creative geeks. When they hanged the working prototype from a tree in Geekcon, the developers didn’t tell anyone what it did so it generated a lot of curiosity. When the first person sat and the swing started laughing people actually burst out in applause! It was an instant success.

By Michal Rothschild and Michal Rinott of the Sonic Texting fame.