Send emoji-like hugs to loved ones via an interactive app channeling good vibrations

“With Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp we’re constantly trying to keep in touch but along the way we’ve lost the physical touch,” says Petter Prinz, a former Google employee, who has just co-founded Hug, an interactive service designed to bring friends, couples and families living on different schedules and different parts of the world closer together.
Hug is a simple, fast and fun way to communicate in a physical, yet digital way. A tactile emoji, if you will. To send a hug, users simply hug their phone by keeping it close to their heart. Using the phone’s proximity sensor, Hug will detect and record how long the hug lasts. Users can then choose what sort of hug they want to send (happy, sad, curious, excited, loving or in the mood for partying). The receiver can then feel the Hug with a vibration corresponding to how long, and with what emotion, the sender hugged the phone for.

The success of emojis, smileys and stickers is unprecedented, having more or less established a recognised international lingo. So much so that the idea for Hug came from the heart ♥ emoji being the most texted word of 2014. And there's no doubt that the emoji will continue to go from strength to strength, with app-based services like Hi Art letting us create home-made emojis in minutes. Let's not forget, a picture still paints a thousand words.