多久没有去拥抱一个人了？——通过机器 紧紧包裹自己 感受一个人拥抱的快乐。
Sign of the times: Can hugging machines solve the touch crisis?
By MOLLY HANSON
As the American loneliness epidemic reaches alarming new heights, one artist theorizes on what connection might look like in the future.
Photography: Scottie Cameron
The Compression Carpet is a machine created by Los Angeles-based artist Lucy McRae that simulates a hug to a person craving intimacy.
Research indicates that nearly half of Americans lack daily meaningful interpersonal interactions with a friend or family member. This loneliness epidemic is accompanied by a touch crisis.
McRae's art and neuroscience suggest that it is affectionate touch that we are deprived of in our increasingly touch-phobic society. New sensory technology seeks to solve this problem.
We are, according to research, on the brink of a mass human (dis)connection crisis United States.
A new study by Cigna found that nearly half of Americans lack daily meaningful interpersonal interactions with a friend or family member, while 43 percent say they have weak relationships and experience feelings of isolation, and a devastating 18 percent claim that they feel there is no one that they can talk to. Alongside this loneliness epidemic is a touch, or lack-of-touch, crisis.
As technology rapidly begins to take over various aspects of our lives from food delivery to gene editing, could machines possibly replace human touch? One artist thinks it might be the future.
Technological Antidotes For Touch
Photography: Scottie Cameron
The Compression Carpet is a machine created by Los Angeles-based artist Lucy McRae that simulates a hug to a person craving intimacy.
It works like this: A person is sandwiched horizontally between a pair of cushions which offer a full-body embrace. The cushions are colored peach and brown, providing the aesthetic of warm skin tones in order to enhance the illusion of being cradled by human flesh. To use the machine you would lie down inside the cushions while another person cranks the handle to squeeze the machine around you. He or she determines the firmness of the machine's hug.
The machine was unveiled at the San Francisco exhibition Festival of the Impossible, which explored the future intimacy between humans and machines. Participants were able to try out the Compression Carpet, with many leaving with "a glazed look in their eyes" after being squeezed McRae told Dezeen.
McRae, a science fiction artist and body architect, uses her art to examine a statement she makes on her website claiming, "We are going to have a revolution of what it means to be human."
As we move toward a touch crisis in which we're inundated with technology to the detriment of our mental well-being, McRae says that the Compression Carpet and its sister creation, the Compression Cradle, question whether technology will vie for our affection because of our obsession with the digital.
It might already be happening. Like it or not, smartphones wrapped in synthetic flesh might soon be a thing.
Researchers have developed a skin prototype called Skin-On Interfaces, sensitive skin-like cases that can be put over mobile phones, watches, or laptop touchpads to simulate skin-on-skin touch. The fake flesh intelligently registers nuances of touch and associates them with various human emotions. For example, anger is associated with hard pressure, while stroking is understood as comfort. The next step is adding anthropomorphic bells and whistles to make the smartskin more realistic, such as temperature features and, uh, embedded hair.
Because skin is what we use as an interface when interacting with other humans, the idea behind Skin-On was to add this human-like interface to our communicative mediation devices., explained Marc Teyssier, a developer of the synthetic sleeve, to Hypebeast.