If you enter the search term love and technology into Google, you will end up with a bunch of links telling you how technology is bad for good old love. Apparently it gets in the way of romance, turning your life’s warm cuddly bits into cold digital bytes. But why fight what you can instead put to good use? GN Focus presents some ideas for recruiting technology to serve romance — a guide to love in the time of electronics.
Get the mood right
The first step is to get the ambience right for your romantic evening. Let’s start with the lighting. You probably know that colours and brightness affect mood. So invest in smart lights that you can control from the comfort of your couch. The Lifx bulb, for instance, lets you choose from millions of shades via a smartphone app. Or get the Philips Hue series, which can be programmed to respond to inputs — for example, lower the brightness when you turn on the music, start flashing like a disco when you want to dance, or simply turn off when you clap.
Set romance in the air
Why not add a catalyst to the mix by going after your loved one’s olfactory system? You can buy aroma diffusers to use in conjunction with smart switches such as the Belkin WeMo, which controls when, where and how strongly certain aromas are released into the room. You can go a bit geeky by adding motion sensors so that when your partner walks past a certain part of the room, a fresh wave of the aroma is automatically triggered. Now that’s literally romance in the air. Also, in certain parts of the room, deploy air ionizers. These generate ozone-rich air — the refreshing kind you inhale on a mountain top. Perhaps, love might flourish better in such conditions.
Stay focused
Distraction certainly kills the romantic mood, so block out extraneous intrusions and create a sound cocoon by using white noise generators. You can choose models from Marpac, Conair, Ecotones or SoundOasis. These machines also offer audio loops to enhance the foreground. Imagine you and your partner spending a peaceful evening together, in what sounds like an Amazonian forest or perhaps a seashore complete with seagulls.
Project romance
Imagine having stars and the distant galaxies spinning away on the ceiling, while you hold hands and murmur sweet nothings underneath. All you need for this is a Pico Projector pointed upwards. Choose one with a short throw so that it covers more area. You can also buy a dedicated indoors planetarium. Why not experiment with projecting the night sky downwards at the floor? Imagine walking among the stars and stepping around the moon.
And why leave the walls alone? You could project a ceiling-to-floor fish tank, or a forest or any other romantic backdrop on those. Let your imagination go wild.
Poetry in motion
We don’t know how many words a picture or video are really worth. But instead of counting, combine them to create some modern audiovisual poetry. The free Wordeo app takes your romantic message and pulls a series of appropriate images from Getty’s vast library. You can customise these or add your own. Then choose a romantic track and your ode to your partner is ready, all in a couple of minutes.
Also check out Google’s Auto Awesome feature for videos — click a bunch of pictures or short videos and let Google’s servers stitch them together to create a mushy romantic video complete with background score.
Deliver perfectly
If you find it difficult to remember long romantic speeches, use the wall behind your partner as a teleprompter screen and scroll your romantic dialogue on it. And if you are worried about being caught out, set up a kill switch. Use a webcam, an Xbox Kinect or a Leap Motion to detect certain movements, such as touching your left ear, to instantly get rid of the text on the wall. Or use a microphone — a single cough should do the trick.
Control covertly
If you have no idea how the evening will pan out, there is no sense in setting up a predefined chain of events. Instead, switch to a dynamic mode and covertly tweak the surroundings. Use a phone app such as Tasker to listen for certain key phrases — for example the term getting hot. So whenever you weave it into a sentence, your phone immediately triggers a set of actions such as switching the lights to a cooler shade, lowering the room temperature or closing (or opening) the curtains.
Print a gift in 3D
Use a 3D printer to create customised objects. What could be better than gifting something that is unique, of which there exists precisely one? Incidentally, at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, ChefJet printers were demoed — you can now 3D-print pastries, cookies and other sweets. In fact, Jamal Maraqa, Managing Director of Protech Dubai, an IT solutions provider in the region, told GN Focus last year that he estimates 3D printers will be used regularly from this year, with everyone in the UAE having adopted the technology for personal use by 2016. Now that’s embracing technology.
