Techies 13: Love is all over

Kissing device lets you send a long-distance smooch 

If you're missing your partner and fancy a smooch, it's time to pucker up. Well, as long as you don't mind kissing an eyeless Mr Potato Head, that is.

A new messaging device, dubbed Kissenger, lets users send kisses wirelessly to one another. Unveiled at the Designing Interactive Systems conference in Newcastle, UK, in June, Kissenger comprises a pair of pressure-sensitive soft plastic lips which protrude through a smooth plastic casing the size of a large Easter egg.

The lips contain pressure sensors and actuators. When you kiss them, the shape changes you create are transmitted in real time over the net to a receiving Kissenger. There, the actuators reproduce the mirror image of the pressure patterns you created– magically transmitting your smacker to your partner.

"People have found it a very positive way to improve intimacy in communications with their partners when they are apart," claims Hooman Samani of Singapore-based Lovotics, which developed the device.

The device is a prototype and Samani says it will not be commercialised until "all the ethical and technical considerations are covered". He adds: "I am not interested in sexual uses for it."

How romantic – but also strangely reminiscent of the 1983 Steve Martin comedy The Man With Two Brains, in which Martin's crazed neurosurgeon character falls in love with a disembodied brain in a glass jar – so much so that he sticks a pair of lips to the container.

Kissenger is not the first gadget aimed at transmitting long-distance smooches. A French-kiss simulator arrived in May 2011 courtesy of the Kajimoto Lab at the University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo, Japan. Looking like a cross between a breathalyser and a hamster's water bottle, it featured a straw that, when rotated by the holder's tongue, moved a similar straw in a machine elsewhere, thereby transmitting the French-kissing tongue motion.

Like most commentators, US broadcaster CNN was unimpressed. The researchers' idea of recording celebrity tongue motions for all to experience was not particularly well received.

"I think that approach is too much and I find it kind of creepy," says Samani. "You don't need to transmit all the parameters of a kiss. The main aim is to improve long-distance relationships. We've taken several steps to minimise the creepiness."