The Most Intimate Thing You Can Do With Your Smartphone

For all the junk food apps they’ve introduced to our daily diets, it’s hard to argue with the fact that smartphones give us an incredible array of tools for staying in touch with our loved ones. High-quality video chat has made it possible to catch up face-to-face no matter where you are in the world and apps like Snapchat have given us new forums for expressing intimate, vulnerable, and spontaneous moments. Still, though, whether you’re reading a text message or watching a friend’s smiling face, both are trapped behind a slab of glass. Touch Room, a weird little iPhone app, facilitates a different type of interaction altogether. It lets you reach through that glass window and actually touch someone.

You could argue that the app doesn’t do anything at all. You open it, establish a “touch room,” and send a link to a friend. There’s nothing inside the room until you put your finger on the screen–when you do, your fingertip shows up as a red dot. When your friend puts a finger on their screen, their fingertip shows up as a red dot too; as they move it, the virtual fingertip darts around your screen in real time. Then, when your two fingertips overlap, both phones vibrate. That’s it. The app does nothing besides letting you and a loved one execute a remote, synchronous smartphone version of an E.T.-style finger-to-finger kiss.