The bed: a medium for intimate communication
From ThesisWiki
Contents |
Authors
Chris Dodge
Overview
This is one of the early papers on technologically mediating intimacy at a distance, following the Feather, Scent and Shaker paper a year earlier. It uses the bed, a unique source of full body shared location, as the medium for intimate interaction at a distance. Although the place of action is the bed, the objects of interaction are pillows and curtains. There are two pillows, one for the head and one to acts as a surrogate in place of the partner. The head pillow senses breath and voice, the body pillow motion and presence.
These inputs are translated into outputs of curtain's swaying, colored shadows, non-verbal whispers, "heartbeats", and warmth. The back and forth allowed between two beds "provides a non-literal representation of a 'conversation'". The messages transmitted are purposefully abstract.
Reflection
The bed was not tested in a real-world manner with intimately involved couples nor does the original research seem to be done in a user-centered manner. The work does seems to be influential to more recent projects.
There are lots of components in the system, making setup an issue. I wonder if they are all necessary to convey a sense of intimacy. If this used just the pillows I think it would still work; the curtains feel out of place to me, like they were trying to cramp too much into it.
