Making texting even more interactive, providing a real time and almost physical link with the person you’re chatting with, ‘Feel Me’ is the new app for the iOS that is set to change the way that we think about texting once again.
Apple’s iOS, the operating system that runs all of their iPhone and iPad technology, has already dramatically influenced the way we text. Their instant messenger records your whole conversation as a flowing dialogue making text chats seem more natural and allowed us to easily send text, pictures and videos for free. Blackeberry instant messenger also empowered the text into a more responsive and engaging platform.
Next step is ‘Feel Me’, an app that has been finished but is yet to go on sale, has demonstrated the new stage in text interaction. The Feel Me app will be able to record where one person is touching their phone’s touch screen, it synchronises that information with the device that they are texting and shows their movements to let users feel each other’s presence that little bit more.
Marco Triverio, interaction designer at IDEO and inventor of the Feel Me app, described the different forms of mobile phone communication as “Synchronous” and “Asynchronous”. Synchronous communication are the completely interactive modes, primarily the actual phone call where users converse audibly and immediately meaning a much closer and more intimate experience. Whereas asynchronous communication lacks that immediate response element. Texting is asynchronous, when you send a text it just wizzes off into the cosmos, more similar to a letter, a text involves no direct contact with the other person.
The Feel Me app will change all that. That physical connection gained with synchronised touch screens provides a physical connection that Marco Triverio believes will translate into an emotional connection.
To many it might seem like a romantic notion, being able to feel where you beau is placing their fingers, however for others an invention like this might be another development bringing their private lives even more public. In many cases the whole value of a text is that it is less personal or demanding, might it become that much more awkward when the person you never wanted texting you in the first place can now even see when you’re purposefully not responding.
However well Feel Me catches on, it’s certainly a big change how future apps develop. Now that we can synchronise text messaging, what will be the next step in bringing instant messengers closer together?
