As you…
Today playful interactions, games, toys, and things that we can project our imagination are all becoming more digital, where people can immerse themselves in places that could never possibly experience a few years ago, and there is no turning back. Companies are investing hard to predict the next innovation, like virtual or augmented reality glasses, but our physical distance from each other gets wider, and we keep focusing on sight and hearing, but what about the other senses?
When we play we not only express ourselves but we let our bodies incorporate in a moment what we could be, resignifying our surroundings, and creating a whole new narrative in our heads, like a simple stick as a magic wand. Throughout history, we create symbols and characters that inspired us, from Golias to Batman, and they got represented as playful applications, but what if we could incorporate others’ emotions with a sense that is being thrown away?
What if we could incorporate other people’s feelings to induce empathy?
Technological anatomy
“As you...” is a system to connect people’s feelings with a necklace sticker called Asteroidea, which reads our autonomic responses in the body, like heat and GSR to measure our emotions and replicate them in our friends with the capacity of touch, from far or near. With the body scanned and data translated, the connections through the app will replicate the same texture according to your feelings in your friend’s Asteroidea wearable.
To represent all the emotions, Asteroidea counts with the “bubble touch”, a surface made of a flexible kombucha bioplastic with freeze-dried E.Coli cells containing Bluf protein to increase the motility of bacteria according to the intensity of the light emitted (in this case, run from it). A bioresponsive material, considering the internal structure that enables it to bend into the middle when a LED is on to move bacteria to other spots.
This means that according to the intensity of the light, the thickness of touch can change, and the speed of the bend would rely on the lights too. Then, the structure will be activated in four vertices to replicate patterns considering symmetry and distribution in the space to be more accurate with the feelings that it wanna conduct.
Tactile Feelings Glossary
Human interaction
First, the users have to activate, their wearables with the “As you...” app and choose with who they wanna be connected. Then, the players can select or randomize a topic that they wanna talk about and how long they wanna spend. People gonna start interacting with each other, physically or virtually (the app would run in the background) and Asteroidea gonna start scanning our bodies to translate them into textures that could induce the six emotions we express, considering Paul’s Eckman theory.
Concluding it, touch it’s capable to approximate people and represent their feelings through a series of patterns with its own specificities, and so can create a better world with a more healthy society in a world where people are not just distanced physically, but emotionally.
