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Japanese Build a Virtual Hugging Vest
If your only human contact is through a little computer window in a poorly lit room, your life just got a little sadder thanks to Dzmitry Tsetserukou, an assistant professor at Toyohashi University of Technology in Japan. He has designed a collection of motors, sensors, and speakers, stitched into what looks like the straps of a backpack, called the iFeel_IM. The device can simulate a heart beat, the tickling sensation of a butterflies in your stomach, generate warmth and hug even the most repugnant shut-in. From the article: "The quickened thump of an angry heart beat, a spine-tingling chill of fear, or that warm-all-over sensation sparked by true love -- all can be felt even as your eyes stay glued to a computer screen." This device is not to be confused with the hugging vest created by engineers at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst for people with anxiety disorders and the autistic.
The breakthrough, of course, were certain undisclosed details of the two expandable bladders on the upper part of the vest. May or may not have added to realism, but "users didn't care".
Like that thing in JPod...?
... this female android is wearing one? Does that mean she no longer needs her 'flesh and blood' master? 1,000's of geeks best chances for getting lucky skyrocket and then nosedive in less than one week. Technology is such a tempting roller coaster.
10 years of smoking and damnit I'm still alive, dammit I hoped I would skip watching my kids fuck robots. I'm not looking to that Guess who is coming to Dinner homage.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
The griefers will love it.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
All jokes aside, this is probably going to be a very useful tool for care of Austistic Spectrum Disorders. Getting used to human intimacy through training and gradual introductions.
i know not what weapons the next world war will be fought with, but world war IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
We all know where this is headed. Sooner or later someone in Japan will build an anatomically correct schoolgirl android and pay her to put her panties in a vending machine so he could buy the panties and sniff them alone in his apartment... so alone.
Temple Grandin, an animal welfare advocate and autistic, invented a hug machine in the 1960s
This ain't rocket surgery.
Just build a damn pr0n doll already. These "robotics researchers" are dancing around the bush (figuratively and literally) using odd justifications. We don't want a hug or a Walmart greeter, we want to [beep] something perdy.
Table-ized A.I.
Bear hug bitch! I'm gonna squeeze your brains out remotely.
Looks like women can turn that vest around for a different kind of experience.
Those wacky Japanese are at it again, I see.
First beer and panties in vending machines, then anatomically correct androids, and now this? Poor, deprived people.
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
Oh my God, this is sad.
Computers are really bad for a lot of people. Get outside and interact with actual people in the sunlight.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
That's actually pretty sad
Now, if they just create the face-stab model...
Combine this with the GameCrush.com orrrrrr ChatRoulette.com and you have yourself one hell of a party and pants area excitement.
~Mekkah
The Japanese will build a Virtual Tentacle Raping Schoolgirl Mini-Skirt?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Someone hug me!
Somehow I envision a bunch of smiling tweenage Japanese schoolgirls in an Internet cafe each wearing one of these emblazoned with a Hello Kitty logo staring at the avatar of their boyfriend who is sitting at a nearby computer in the very same cafe.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Does this thing have a tentacle attachment?
I would like one very much.
FuFme! http://www.welookdoyou.com/fufme/ A bit outdated though, laptop version would be great.
This summary doesn't accurately describe the intention of this device.
It was actually mentioned in my human-computer interactions class.
The idea is that a long-distance couple wears these vests and one of the couple can trigger the other couple's vest to simulate a hug.
So it's a way for long-distance couples to deal with being away from each other for a while.
A little silly, but a cute idea.
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." - Pablo Picasso
When will they hit the shelves in Europe? Will it run Linux?
in Grandin's line of work, means being able to predict what a cow will do in a given situation. A famous example is trouble that the cow industry had in giving cows baths. The cows were supposed to walk up a ramp and step into a sunken cow-sized bathtub full of cow-cleaning solution (I'm surely not using the proper cow jargon here, but it doesn't matter). They got nervous and fidgety and fought with each other and caused time-consuming hassle during this operation. Grandin figured out that the cows reacted badly to the prospect of slipping on the ramp, so she told the bathtub crew to add a non-slip surface, which fixed the problem, smoothing out and speeding up the operation and saving the cow guys a lot of money. She did all kinds of similar things in other areas of cow processing. THAT is why she is able to get paid the big bucks, for repeated demonstrable success at solving actual practical cow problems, regardless of the beliefs of flamers like yourself who appear primarily into tearing other people down.
TFA is trying to make the reader think along the lines of the device promoting greater interactivity while online; but I immediately thought of the first wave of humans in Asimov's universe - the ones who lived in complete isolation from each other (with robots as their sole companions), and who experienced dreadful anxiety and thoughts of revulsion when faced with meeting another human in person.
I don't really like that universe... I'm not sure we should be making it easier for people to avoid interacting with each other.
#DeleteChrome
Leonard Hoffsteader built one when he was a kid, because his mother wouldn't hug him. Apparently his father used to borrow it.
"Apparatus dignosco occultus, satis non supernus."
It looks like I'm finally going to be getting a life!
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
It's only a matter of time before they start integrating gravitational hyper-crystals into the design.
I read the internet for the articles.
Not sure what this means but I'm sure it's related.
No excuse for the Dr Seuss hidden reference, btw.
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
Some people had very bad experiences with human interactions when they were children. They got badly bullied at school or whatever, and that impacted their psychological development to the point where "interacting with actual people in the sunlight" is psychologically distressing to them.
Furthermore, some people are fat and/or repulsive to the point where other people don't want to interact with them. So all attempts to do so just result in rejection and depression.
Its not like the sort of person who plays WoW in the basement all day would go frolic in the sun if WoW wasn't around. The reason they do not go out much is not because WoW is there...but because they don't like to go out.
Devices like this are a boon to such people.
Pass your judgements elsewhere, we aren't interested.
This is a sad little product, developed by sad little people for a sad little world that's just getting sadder. Go out, meet people, talk to them, listen to them, get real hugs! Everybody talks about how the internet connects people, but all I see is it making it easier to stay disconnected from actual people!
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Looking back at lonelier episodes in my life and looking at the lonely episodes, sometimes decades, of others I notice the habit of notably more frequent hot bathing during those times. I've come to find that a warm bath is a suprisingly good substitute for the physical and emotional warmth of a sustained intimate embrace. (Gee, I can't believe how technical that sentence sounds ...)
I'm quite sure that many people subconsciously chose a warm bath as a substitute without really being aware of it. I don't think this vest can beat that. Or a mammal pet, for that matter - the more obvious choice of human substitute for the socially handicapped.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
just leave it to the japanesee to build electronics which are little strange and pointless