Pump and Surf uses an air pump to ‘manually’ surf the web

Everyday you likely visit websites like this one, browsing the content without giving much thought to how it gets to your eyeballs. Of course there is plenty technology required throughout this process, but how much energy does all this equipment consume?

As a hands-on (or foot-on) demonstration of the energy involved, ECAL’s Aurélien Pellegrini created Pump and Surf, which makes you pump the equivalent of the energy needed to load the webpage.

– Werbung –

The device utilizes an air pump, with a pressure sensor to take readings via an Arduino Uno that interfaces with your computer. A special Chrome extension calculates the energy necessary to pull up a particular page, forcing you to put in the equal amount of physical effort to display the site in its original form.