Remote Valentine: Glove Tech Puts 'Touch' into Long-Distance Relationships
Researchers from Simon Fraser University's School of Interactive Arts and Technology (SIAT) have designed a pair of interconnected gloves called 'Flex-N-Feel.' When a user's fingers flex in one glove, the actions are transmitted to a remote partner wearing the other. The glove's tactile sensors allow the wearer to 'feel' the movements. To capture the flex actions, the sensors are attached to a microcontroller. The sensors provide a value for each bend, and are transmitted to the 'feel' glove using a WiFi module. The sensors are also placed strategically on the palm side of the fingers in order to better feel the touch. A soft-switch on both gloves also allows either partner to initiate the touch. "Users can make intimate gestures such as touching the face, holding hands, and giving a hug," says associate professor Carman Neustaedter.
Transcript
00:00:00 [Music] I love you too currently we are running a study with the telepresence robots where we bring them into coup's homes we've done a few families in Vancouver and they've been connecting to people in all parts of the world unlike Skype and FaceTime the remote caller can actually move around the space they're in by driving
00:00:27 the robot what this allows them to do is get a real sense of mobility in the space now they have a physical [Music] body flexing feel is a way to support remote touch over distance so what we found is couples really want to be able to touch each other so with flex and feel we have a pair of interconnected gloves and one person wears a glove the
00:00:52 other person similarly wears a glove and when they bend their fingers on one glove it's felt on the glove of the other person and we've been able to map each segment of the finger to the vibrations and so over distance you could place this vibrating glove that your partner is controlling on body parts to hold hands or sort of touch face or give a nice light massage as
00:01:12 opposed to just seeing them it was like they were actually present with [Music] them