A Dundee student has designed a bench that lets people become internet stars - just by sitting on it.

The Tweeting Seat, created by Chris McNicholl, logs photos of people who sit on the bench and posts the images on social networking site Twitter.

A camera has been installed in the seat to take photos of its surroundings, while another camera is positioned to capture images of those sitting on it, both of which are then fed to its own Twitter account and displayed online.

The account for the bench, which is touring several locations around the city, already has 1700 followers and counting.

Mr McNicholl has left the use of the seat deliberately open-ended, with some ideas for it including placing it at tourism hot spots, so that people can share their unique holiday snaps on Twitter.

The 22-year-old product design honours graduate made the bench to explore whether people can connect where they live and work with what they do or say online.

He says he has had interest from an American fashion companies as well as businesses who think the seat would prove a hit at trade shows and other events.

He took some time out of preparing for the annual degree show at the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design to talk about the innovative bench.

He told STV News: “The whole point of the bench is to explore the potential for connecting our physical communities – for example, the people we work with – to our digital communities – the people we interact with using social networking.

“As people are using social media more and more I wanted to see if it was possible to connect these, to see if people were prepared to accept this object.

“There have been quite a few different uses suggested to me for the seat, I think the aspect of it I like the most is the idea of using it to connect communities.

“Someone was saying to me during the Scottish Elections recently that it would have been great for people to tweet their thoughts on it while sitting on the bench.

He added: “I think something like that could be very interesting, while I think taking it on some sort of road trip and seeing how different people in different locations interact with it could be really good as well.”

1700 followers

Since publicising the Tweeting Seat online, Mr McNicholl has attracted the interest of digital media gurus across the world, while the Twitter account he set up for the special bench has more than 1700 followers and counting.

Residents in Dundee have had the chance to test out the seat recently, when the student set it up in the city centre and the Botanic Gardens.

He said: “Me and my mate took it out and we started to get a lot of very interesting conversations with people using the bench.

“There were also quite a lot of people who were just using it as a normal bench as well.

“I think there is interest in it and it could, with a few electrical alterations, be made very easily, so now it is just down to me getting a clearer idea in my head of what I want it to be used for and what I want it to achieve, although there are a lot of options for moving it forward.”

Mr McNicholl is one of hundreds of students exhibiting his work at the annual degree show, which opens to the public on Saturday and runs throughout next week.

To find out more about the Tweeting Seat, visit its website, while you can also follow the project on Twitter.