Drink Wine Together Even You’re Apart

If your lover cannot be close to you then don’t let the distance deter you from having a drink with your sweetheart!

WiFi technology may one day bring consolation to lonely couples in long-distance relationships in the form of a hi-tech wine glass that glows when their partner picks it up or takes a sip.

There is the hi-tech wineglasses for long distance lovers developed by MIT. The prototype wine glasses, developed by Jackie Lee and Hyemin Chung, use wireless links, liquid sensors and LED lights.

So, when either person picks up a glass, the LED’s on their partner’s glass glow gently and when either person puts the glass to their lips, sensors make white LED’s on the rim of the other glass know when your partner takes a sip. Tests on the so-called lovers’ cups were carried out in separate labs with the result that “people feel as if they are sharing a drinking experience together,” Mr Lee said.

Alongside the lovers’ cups, he has also wired up two salad bowls and two placemats for information exchange and called it the “Dining Together” set.

The place settings send and receive information by radio signal using a tiny internal computer and are backlit by rows of LED to display information. Each salad bowl shows how full the other is and Mr Lee hopes the two placemats could be engineered to display the weather at the other’s site.

The devices can currently only send information as far as the radio signals can travel, which is fairly limited in scope. However Mr Lee hopes to link up the placemats using the internet to stream data on the weather, while the cup and salad bowl transmissions would be transmitted through cell phone towers.

“It’s not to replace the phone or any existing technology for communication, it’s another channel,” he explained.

Mr Lee is not the first researcher to apply technology to the problems of living apart from loved ones. Last year scientists in Singapore devised a vibration jacket for chickens as a means of transmitting the sense of touch over the internet. The jacket gives the wearer the sense of being touched and the researchers at Nanyang Technological University are hoping to apply the technology to children’s pyjamas to enable long-distance cyber-hugs.

Utmost romantic…isn’t it! And, now look at the other aspects, the technology can also be used in hospitals to monitor the daily water-consumption of patients!