Kissing mobile phone for the lonely
I don’t understand why people like to get intimate with their gadgets. It’s creepy! However, if this is your thing, you will be thrilled with Fabian Hemmert, a design researcher at the Berlin University of the Arts, Germany who has come up with a new romantic side of a mobile phone. He has created a series of phone prototypes that can transmit grasping, breathing or even kissing, which he presented last week at the Mobile HCI conference in Stockholm, Sweden. You can be closer than ever to your phone this way. The grasping prototype has force sensors on the phone’s sides and a strap which the user places over their hand. When one person grips their phone it sends a signal to a motor in the other phone that pulls the strap tighter. For the breathing novelty, you will find a pressure sensor on one side and a jet on the other to transmit air movement.
The kissing movement is the most talked about and it features a moisture sensor on the sender’s phone and a motorised wet sponge that pushes against a semi-permeable membrane on the receiver’s phone. You can decide the wetness of the kiss, it can be a quick peck or a passionate kiss. I am not particularly impressed, it all strikes me as particularly weird and strange. The lonely folks will love it.
