The HaptiHug system aims to deliver real world sensory experience from online virtual actions. The prototype is a wearable harness which hooks up to your computer and reacts according to sensory input from the remote virtual world. The whole thing sounds a bit creepy now, but wait until this tech is perfected and you can get realistic hugs from a loved one thousands of miles away.

The thing is being tested out with Second Life at the moment, and rather ambitiously the harness is designed to deliver not just comforting responses, but also feedback based around emotions such as anger, fear and sadness. Bizarre stuff eh? [Via]

 When people are hugging, they generate pressure on the chest area and on the back of each other by the hands, simultaneously. The key feature of the developed HaptiHug is that it physically reproduces the hug pattern similar to that of human-human interaction. The important feature of our system is that we integrate active-haptic device “HaptiHug” and pseudo-haptic touch simulated by haptic animation.