Melissa Chow & Helena Slosar create hugs out of thin air

Melissa Chow and Helena Slosar want people to enjoy “alternative modes of seeing, hearing, and experiencing.” One of their ideas is to create the Like-A-Hug haptic (tactile) vest that would “push past the graphical user interface into a tactile user interface” by inflating and giving you a hug whenever someone “likes” your profile or photo on Facebook. They report that some people liked it and others were “repulsed” by the idea of a digital hug. The vest remains at the prototype stage. In the meantime, they discuss their other work aimed at interrupting “habitual patterns of movement and experience in order to reveal moments of unexpected beauty in everyday phenomena.”