German designer Stefan Ulrich’s Funktionide is like a body pillow best friend (or lover as this video suggests).

Based on EAP-technology “Funktionide” is a concept for an emotional robot that substitutes human contact. In a future where technology will play a huge part in our lives it is very likely that some day it will shift from satisfying our basic functional needs to include our emotional needs as well.

Can a man love a blob made from plastics? Rosanne Barr was married more than once, so I suppose anything can happen. [Project Page]

Let’s say you actually have a flesh and blood “girlfriend”, but you met on the internet, she has never seen a real picture of you and she barely speaks English. Mutsugoto can break down all of those physical and geographic barriers to create a genuine intimate experience with light.

the device was designed to communicate intimacy and to offer an alternative to text and e-mail messaging. While lying on their beds miles away from each other, the couples wear touch-activated rings visible to a camera mounted above them. A computer vision system tracks the movement of the ring as one of the device’s users passes it across their own body, or bed. At the same time these strokes are transmitted to and projected in beams of light on the body of their partner. The lines change colour if they cross.

Plus, this way she won’t feel how fat you are.

Experience Twitter on a more personal, emotional level with this DIY Guardian robot.

Meet the Guardian Robot: This friendly little fellow stands on your desk and monitors your Twitter feed for “happy” and “sad” posts by your friends on your Twitter feed. But unlike conventional alert systems, this robot encourages you to interact with the posts it finds.

For example, when it finds a “happy” post, the Guardian Robot raises its head and arm in triumph. It holds the pose until you give it a “high five” by pushing the switch in its raised hand. Once you do that, the robot pass the high five on to your buddy via a reply Tweet.

Likewise, when the Guardian Robot comes across a sad Tweet, it lowers its head in despair. You cheer it up by giving it a hug, which it will forward on with another reply Tweet.

[Link]

Lonely people often turn to pets to fill the void, but not everyone is cut out for the responsibility. Perfect Petzzz offer a solution with a robot that looks and breathes like a real dog or cat during a slumber that is interrupted only by an on/off switch or the death of a D battery. It’s all of the fun of owning a dog that’s in a coma without all of the hassle. [Perfect Petzzz]

Tired of coming home to an empty house every night? The Expected Curtain makes it appear from the outside as though you have several friends just hanging out in your home, enjoying a motionless staring contest for hours and hours on end. [Link]

One of the saddest products on this list has to be the girlfriend pillow. But look at the guy in the photo — he seems content with a soft, uni-breasted torso. Plus he has the option of picking up a lap pillow for more intimate moments. Also available in a boyfriend version.

Thanks to 64 strategically located actuators, this jacket from Philips reacts with scenes from movies — heightening your emotional reaction. For example, it might hug you repeatedly during a Lifetime movie or pulse like a heartbeat during a tense scene in a horror flick. [Link]

The desk includes a ceiling fixture, made up of 16 1W standard light bulbs mounted onto a square aluminium tube, and cold cathode fluorescent lamps for the lights surrounding the desk. As the creator is currently working on a computer that’ll control the lights to change into different hues of the rainbow, the current mood lighting is controlled using switches, and only produces red, green and blue glows. [Product Page via Core77]

The findings go against popular opinion, which says SMS and IM are the devil, and will lead to the downfall of today’s youth. Next to traipsing on people’s lawns, IMing friends instead of going outside to play is the leading cause of the breakdown in parent-teenager relations today, according to a phone call with my mum earlier this morning.

However, as Hancock and company discovered, not only is this opinion untrue, the emotions presented in virtual conversations are just as contagious at times as real world interaction.

The experiment involved 44 pairs of volunteers, who chatted online for 15 to 20 minutes. Hancock asked them to ask questions about one another, including one issue that was bothering them at the time. But here’s the hitch: Hancock had one person from each pair watch a harrowing scene from Sophie’s Choice. The other person watched a clip of some “small talk.”

What the team discovered was that not only did the participants accurately assess their partner’s mood, but that those who were paired with someone who had watched Sophie’s Choice felt worse off than before the chat. Those participants who watched the car hood scene in Transformers, however, had the irresistible urge to mate following the IM interaction*

*I made this up. [New Scientist]

Its designer claims that the Heart Robot is an example of a soon-to-be common “emotional machines,” which along with providing entertainment to customers, could be used in hospital rehabilitation scenarios as well. Heart looks like he might be a little fun to play with, but due to the fact that he looks terminally ill and has a serious case of permasad I can’t imagine this droopy, disconcerting robot doing a whole lot of good around the children’s ward. [BBC via BoingBoing Gadgets]

For instance, if someone shows fear, the robot can learn to change its behaviour to appear less threatening. If someone seems happy, the robot can make a mental (or, I guess, digital) note of what brought on that response. And if someone seems upset and lonely, the robot can give her a pat on the back, offer her a stiff drink and say “Elaine, you deserved someone better than that dickwad anyhow.”

I, for one, welcome our new emotionally adept overlords. [Physorg]

“I had a cat for many years, and what I miss most about interacting with her is touch,” says Steve. So he designed the furry rabbit robot to be laced with pressure sensors so it can sense where and how it’s being touched or stroked. It then responds by making breathing-like motions, purring vibrations, or ear wiggles.

And though it sounds like a whacky bit of science, apparently a research study at the University of British Columbia showed that people who stroked the bunny had an emotional response even to this limited feedback, and could identify the bunny’s “emotions” across a range of negative to positive.

Does this mean that next-gen Asimo’s will go all soft, and like to be cuddled? Probably not, but I can only guess that Steve’s research will wend its way into future robo-pets that connect to their owners even more than the lovable Pleo seems to. [New Scientist]

Nexi is apparently about the size of a three year-old child, with dextrous hands, arms that can lift up to ten pounds of weight and two-wheel balancing movement, a little like a Segway. Each eye has a colour camera, there’s an IR camera in the forehead for 3D object perception and four microphones so sounds can be localised.

For now, Nexi is just a prototype, designed to explore human-machine interactions and social learning. It’s not too hard to imagine a real product based on the design, though, is it? The team forsee robots like this having a role in healthcare, eldercare and education. [GizmoWatch]