There’s a school of thought, the dominant one, that a thing that you have in your pocket for most of your waking hours should be fairly design-neutral. Like the iPhone: it’s just a black brick that’s about as thin as engineering allows. Well, Japan thinks that is totally fucking dumb.Meet Elfoid, a new phone-thing designed at Osaka University modeled after the Telenoid R1 robot which, if you remember, is designed to be used in long-distance communications to “recreate” the physical presence of the person at the other end of the conversation. So, Elfoid is just the little pocket-size version of that, boasting “soft fleshy urethane skin” and the unmistakable feeling that it is going to blow you out of an airlock.Like the Telenoid, the Elfoid will eventually be able to mimic the movements of its user and transmit those to another Elfoid which will squirm accordingly against your friend or lover or customer service representative’s ear. Also now seems like as good a time as any to wonder why Osaka University hasn’t created one of these that we can have sex with.Telebone, you know?Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.Super thanks toPink Tentacle.
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