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Nostalgic Touch

Record and playback gestures of your loved ones. The robot guides you through the grieving process.

As we grow older, it is inevitable that we would eventually lose our loved ones, friends, or family members. Life is finite and we struggle to capture many moments in life with the current devices that we create.

Nostalgic Touch is an apparatus that captures the hand motions and playbacks the touch gestures. It tries to replicate the sensation of intimacy or affection by playing back the comforting gestures. It stores all the gesture datas of the people who you cared for, then play back after they are gone. It allows the user to store their sense of loving and caring after they pass away.

Nostalgic Touch proposes a new ritual for remembering the deceased in the digital & multicultural age. Similar to rituals in all religions, it gives us sense of comfort to deal with the death. People in Japan, Singapore and China live with extremely high standards of technology but many embrace religious rituals and superstitions (such as Feng Shui, Buddhism and Shinto Animism) as an important part of their wellbeing and decision making Nostalgic Touch explores how emerging technologies could be used to enrich the experience of these rituals. How could we augment these rituals to give an even better sense of comfort and intimacy?

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