Husband and Wife Researchers Create System That Sends Real Hugs Through a Virtual World

iFeel_IM! is a mixed reality system that transmits the virtual interactions of two Second Life avatars to their real world owners via haptic harnesses that have hand shapes, hearts, and other contact points. Express affection for someone in Second Life, and their harness will contract to "hug" them. Recently showcased in Europe, it's the product of two researchers based in Japan's Toyohashi University, Dzmitry Tsetserukou and Alena Neviarouskaya (pictured), who also happen to be married. (In Second Life, their avatars are Milan Luminos and Alena Naidoo.) Being a couple turned out to be a convenient thing for their project, which you can read about in full detail here, and in the video below, featuring the couple in real and avatar form:

"When developing the devices, first we tested them on ourselves," Professor Neviarouskaya told me in a recent email. "The soft hands of [the] HaptiHug devices were sketched from our palms." She sees real world applications far beyond romantic touch across the Internet, however. "This device might ensure the feeling of social presence of separated family members, couples, or friends."

Making the system work wasn't just a hardware challenge. Alena Neviarouskaya created a software system that can emotionally interpret text messages, so iFeel_IM! can work automatically.

Dubbed the "Affect Analysis Model", the program deals with "not only grammatically and syntactically correct textual input," she says, "but also informal messages written in an abbreviated or expressive manner." (Say, emoticons and Internet slang.) "The strength of the resulting emotional state depends on vectors of emotional words, relations among them, tense of the analysed sentence, and availability of first person pronouns."

During tests in Japan, Dzmitry Tsetserukou and Alena Neviarouskaya found that children most enjoyed the tickling sensations created by the butterfly-shape, while young couples and women enjoyed the hugs. "Although hugging does not play essential role in Japanese culture (bowing is more accepted than touching)," she says, "everyone wanted to experience it."

So when will this become a commercial project? Professor Neviarouskay tells me there's no plans for the near future, but after a recent demo in Tokyo, "representatives of several companies had expressed their interest." In other words, keep looking for an Internet you can feel.

Comments

[Arcadia Codesmith]

The hugger is cute.

The meat of the research is in the text parsing for emotional weight. If we could combine it with a more versatile face animator and a nuanced posture generator, this has the potential to give avatar presentation a quantum boost out of the uncanny valley... which is nothing but win for more widespread adoption.

[Loki]

what a delightful idea, would be better if it was just incorporated into a plain t-shirt rather than an imbarressing collection of cut out shapes and straps :)

[Sqeeze Me]

Oh, I can think of so many parts of the human body that could be touched, rubbed and squeezed...

The application area for thoses devices are endless(ly pleasurable).

[Talvin Muircastle]

Ah, yes! When those Big Corporate Meetings finally become popular in SL, *everybody* will wear one of these! Think of it!

Somebody will come up with a firm handshake macro to go with it, I hope.

...Wait, what did you think I meant?

[Ted]

I'm all for new technology. But this is clearly too much time spent in Second Life. Anyone creating a hug generator needs to consider a nice long vacation.