This reminded me of another project, namely One2One: a toolkit for creating personalised ambient media links for conveying togetherness over a distance:

how can we give somebody a hug if they’re not near us? often this impulse will drive us to call the loved-one to ‘say hello’, or send a quick text message but does this capture our emotion? The problems that I see in this exchange are these… More often than not, calls to our mobiles catch us at the wrong time. Either we’re in an elevator, or a meeting, or having a conversation that we don’t want to interrupt. This has a psychological affect on our attitudes towards the answered call. If the call is answered, and even if we only wanted to simply express that we were thinking about the other person, we get caught in chit-chat. An expressive conversation (“hi, i’m thinking about you”) quickly turns to an instructive one (“can you grab some staples on the way home?”). Also, this interaction is absent of touch – a key form of emotional communication.