Mobile devices with emotion

We think of mobile devices mainly as information exchange devices. The provide exchange of thoughts through words and also from looking up information on the internet they can provide sources of information, data and even ideas. The mobile devices of today are equipped with a lot of sensors: accelerometers, gravity, light, sound and even pressure. However, they are not very tactile devices. They do not respond with these sensors and communicating with another person is only limited through the use of words in text messages or through words in sounds.

There is a need for some more.

A PhD student, Fabian Hemmert, at the Berlin University of the Arts would like to move the devices to do much more. Fabian would like the phone to be more responsive and communicate with the other person on the phone in other ways. For example, he would like the phone to be more intimate. It needs to have a moisture sensor that can sense water or tear drops, the tightness on how you hold the phone, and an airflow sensor that can measure the phone callers breath. These would bring the two callers on the phone much closer to each other.

Fabian is combining art with the science of mobile phones and has thought up phones that would respond by changing the center of gravity of the phone, the phone would be able to communicate better to the owner also through other means by breathing or pulsating.

There are other aspects too – for example phones might be able to respond based on the urgency of the call by being more than sound and vibration but rather by changing their shape, for example the phone could end up becoming bigger than they actually are and thus feel like they were growing out of the pocket!

Though these are just ideas at the present moment there are other ways that mobile devices can communicate back to the owners rather than just display pretty pictures on giant screens or being status symbols or jewelry items.

https://www.drlab.org/?


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