Kissenger: Transmitting Kiss Through the Internet

Kissing is one of the most intimate forms of human interaction. In order to have love and sex with robots and virtual characters, it is essential to develop technologies and interfaces to facilitate such intimacy. Kissenger extends our sense of touch by creating a physical communication channel for humans to experience haptic kissing sensations through the Internet. It also provides an interface that can be integrated with robots and virtual agents to allow them to interact with humans in an intimate way. Kissenger uses an array of linear actuators to generate haptic stimulations on the human lips and force sensors to measure the force output. We developed a prototype that can be plugged into a mobile phone, so that users can send kisses to their loved ones while talking to them on their phones. In order to investigate the role of robotic kissing in digital communication, we conducted a haptic version of the Imitation Game proposed by Alan Turing. Results show that robotic kissing has no effect on the winning rates of the male and female players during human-human communication, but it increases the winning rate of the female player when a chatbot is involved in the game.