Cuddly app makes your smartphone squishy and huggable

Is your smartphone just not lovable enough? Sure, you find yourself ignoring loved ones who are physically present while you spend hours texting and Tweeting and Facebook-ing, but despite its irresistible lure, you can’t help but feel you could somehow have a better relationship with your phone if you could wrap your arms around it, and give it a hug.

Ok, maybe not. But that doesn’t make an app developed by a team of grad students at the Keio University Graduate School of Media Design in Japan any less intriguing. Less practical, perhaps, but still kind of neat.

The team has created an app that lets you turn any soft object, like a stuffed animal or a pillow, into a huggable case for your phone. Using the Cuddly app (currently not released) by the team, your phone uses the smartphone’s camera and LED flash to assess the brightness in the current environment. When you hug the soft object, the stuffing around the phone compresses, reducing the light entering the camera, and causing the phone to react in whichever way it’s been programmed.

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As CNET points out, this might not be practical if you’re trying to conserve your phone’s battery life, but for short periods, it could definitely be used in some interesting applications. The coolest part about this is that depending on how the team develops the technology, it could work on just about any phone (or even an iPod Touch), and could be used in just about any soft object filled with stuffing.

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