Aimed at bringing the emotion of
touch in human-computer interfaces
A
French researcher has invented a robot finger that attaches to your mobile
phone. It can wriggle across your desk. It can stroke your hand.
“My
PhD subject is around touch in communications,” explains Marc Teyssier, a
researcher at Telecom Paristech engineering school. “When we talk with people
in real life we touch each other to communicate emotions, for example a stroke
on the arm, or stuff like that. But for mobile devices and interaction in
general in computers, we don’t use touch at all. So my starting point was: how
can we bring touch in human-computer interfaces?”
So
he designed, built and patented the MobiLimb robotic finger, which plugs into a
mobile phone and looks very much like a real finger. It can drag the phone
across the table. Your friends can activate it and operate it remotely, to give
you a comforting pat on the wrist when they talk to you.
But
when people saw it, everyone had the same reaction.
“We
have a tonne of reaction on the internet, like: ‘It’s creepy’. Everybody tells
me it’s creepy. And it is, actually, in fact,” Mr. Teyssier said. “We
communicate with humans with touch. We use fingers. We use motion. But when we
put that on a mobile device, everybody thinks it’s crazy and creepy.”
The
creepy phone finger tells us something about who we are, and what we expect
from a world where your phone listens and responds to your commands like a
person, but still doesn’t have a moving body, Mr. Teyssier said. For now, he
thinks, the robot finger is both too human, and not quite human enough.
A hug from fridge
“I
think to some extent we are right in the uncanny valley. Technology looks like
human, but its not exactly human, so our brain - we don’t know how to react.”
But
Mr. Teyssier imagines a world one day where you would interact with objects the
way you do with other people or pets. Someday, you might walk into your kitchen
and get a hug from your fridge.
“With
this project, we question a lot: the smartphone and the human being and human
nature,” he said. “What if all devices had arms and limbs and were able to
touch us like a human? I think we would behave totally differently with
technology.
