Say you’re in a bar. You see someone across the room who looks appealing. But do they think the same of you? You don’t want to stare for too long,

‘Nostalgia for a Dating Experience They’ve Never Had’

submited by

Style Pass

2024-04-19 23:30:04

Say you’re in a bar. You see someone across the room who looks appealing. But do they think the same of you? You don’t want to stare for too long, so you turn back to your drink. No worries—the electronic tentacles attached to your shoulders give a wiggle, indicating that the hottie, mercifully, has glanced your way.

That’s the premise of a device called “Ripple,” named, I guess, for the undulating sensation triggered by a stranger’s horny gaze. Equipped with two cameras, it connects computer-vision technology with sensors to detect when someone is looking at you. (Unfortunately, it can’t really distinguish between the eyes of an admirer and someone noticing you because you’re wearing tentacles out to the bar.) Ripple’s creators pitched it as a way to help people meet in person—the old-fashioned way, with, um, one minor difference.

It was developed in 2017—five years after Tinder and Hinge launched, when people were getting nervous about the effects of dating apps. They’d created a society-wide experiment: “What if we stopped dating people we meet in our regular lives and started building some other system, where major corporations use algorithms to figure out how we meet?” Eli Finkel, who studies romantic relationships at Northwestern University, told me. What would it mean for technology to mediate romantic connection? Would it make us all irreparably incapable of courting on our own?