Tuesday, August 22, 2006

The World is a Very Weird Place

I saw this on Wired. It's a "hug shirt". Basically, your blue tooth-enabled phone transmits a hug from your friend/whatever to your shirt - i.e. "your mobile receives the data (hug pressure, skin temperature, heartbeat rate, time you are hugging for, and the name of the person you want to hug) and delivers it to the other person."

I'm not sure that orange circle thing is attractive, especially on the guy. They look like rejects from Logan's Run.

Once again, I am intrigued by the possibilities that haven't been considered. Can I use this to encourage productivity in my group. Some team members - namely me - would be nauseated, but others might feel comforted getting a group hug if they've done something particularly well. And why not an ambient hug shirt? Application producing more errors? A bigger hug....and bigger...until it's no longer a pleasant snug feeling, but a suffocating feeling, as though the very walls of your cube were hugging you.

Can you put them on orphans during the early stages to mimic parental touch and squeezing? Maybe give cell phones to a few thousand volunteer teenagers with text messaging issues and make them feel it's not all pointless thumb twiddling?

When will they make the underpants version?

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