Filed under: Robots

Remember when you were a kid and you told your friends that you totally loved your new computer, and some little luddite looked at you and said, “So why don’t you marry it?” There was that brief moment when you thought your Commodore 64 could, in fact, make a nice spouse. If not, move along. If so, David Levy told participants at a conference last week that we would all be having loving relationships with robots by 2050, not just trysts in Massachussetts. He predicts that we’ll have robots as sex toys within five years and true, deep relationships later on. Some robots already kiss, some seem to hate, but Levy says we’ll have emotional relationships based on conversation by mid-century. Until that time, remember your C64, your first true love. She / she remembers you, you selfish jerk.

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Filed under: Wearables

Believe it or not, the concept here isn’t revolutionary at all, but Studio 5050 is revising the old huggable shirt idea by infusing an ultra-soft hoodie with a pattern made of “silver conductive fabric.” When two people wearing the embrace-me hoodies, um, embrace one another, energy is transferred and a pattern on the back lights up while a heartbeat sound is emitted. Quite frankly, we can’t imagine this not boosting the hugs-per-day in a typical relationship, but at $480 to $600 per pair, counseling may come out a bit cheaper in the end.

[Via OhGizmo]

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Filed under: Digital Cameras

FujiFilm just busted out another of “Z” for Zoom, FinePix shooter. The 20-mm thin Z200fd follows-up the “surprisingly good” Z100fd with a 10 megapixel, 1/2.3-inch CCD sensor; 5x, image stabilized, optical zoom lens; 2.7-inch LCD; SD/SDHC and xD card support; and ISO support up to 1600. It also features a new “love timer” with setting for near (1 heart), close-up (2 hearts), and sloppy-tongue-wrestling (3 hearts) depending upon the level of icky-sticky sweetness (or hipster annoyance judging by that pic) you’d like to capture. Set for release in Japan on June 7th for ¥40,000 or about $388 by the time it shows up Stateside to document your breakup.

[Via Impress]

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Filed under: Cellphones

We know, Valentine’s Day 2008 has come and gone, but if you’ve managed to hold on to your SO through the Hallmark-inspired holiday, chances are you won’t need these services anyway. For those waking up solo, however, you should probably listen up. South Korea’s KTF has launched a seductive new service — rightfully dubbed Love Detector — for its subscribers which will actually “analyze voice patterns to see if a lover is speaking honestly and with affection.” In an interesting twist, the data is actually only shown to the customer who coughs up ₩1,500 ($1.58) per month (or less per call), so don’t expect to secretively find out if your lover has another lover waiting next door via voice analysis.

[Image courtesy of WestCoastPioneers, thanks Sandra]

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Filed under: Cellphones

digg_url = ‘http://digg.com/apple/iPhone_marriage_proposal’; Maybe we just turn a bit sentimental during the holiday season, but damn it, we’ll admit to getting a little choked up over reader Claude M’s well-planned, uber-geeky proposal to his girlfriend — even if his method of choice did happen to employ the totally overexposed iPhone. Being the romantic fellow that he is, Claude spent what must have been numerous hours producing a video proposal in the style of those ubiquitous commercials — as you can see after the break — and then screened it for his sweetheart (probably on his or her you-know-what) while they were strolling around the area where they’d first met in college. We’d like to congratulate the happy couple — she said yes, duh — and encourage them to race over to our Christmas contest post, where they have decent odds of scoring a pair of round trip tickets for the honeymoon.

Continue reading iPhone marriage proposal warms even the cynical heart

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