Kissing Controller Puts the Passion in Video Game

Nobody ever called the combination of video games and bowling a recipe for love, but a new video game controller might just turn that unlikely combination into romance.

That's the idea behind the kissing controller, a project by Hye Yeon Nam, a student at Georgia Tech. With the controller, two players at a time control the path of an on-screen bowling ball with a long, passionate kiss.

For Nam, the kissing controller is a way to get a little more emotion into the devices she's used to working with.

Courtesy Hye Yeon Nam

Models demonstrate Hye Yeon Nam's kissing controller by playing a bowling game.

"I had been making a lot of different installations and a lot of different devices. All the time, I wanted to show people's behavior through my work," she told AOL News. "How can I foster ... a positive feeling with this work? Kissing is one of ... the ways that people express their love, so with this, they kiss more."

The technology is relatively simple, though it sounds less than sexy when described. One partner, the man in the video, has a small magnet attached to his tongue with Fixodent. The other partner has a headset receiver that can monitor the movement of the tongue in her mouth's using the relative strength of the magnet. The controller feeds the information back to the game, and it controls the path of the ball.

When Nam came from South Korea to study at Georgia Tech seven years ago, she didn't play a lot of video games. But they were a part of the culture at college, and as she played more and more she found the controllers limiting. Even modern motion controls like Kinect and Wii seemed sort of empty.

"I wanted to show another way to use the body, but a new part of the body," she says. "And kissing is very special."

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Nam chose for the demonstration video a couple who had been kissing for a long time and were comfortable in each other's mouths. But that isn't the only kind of relationship that the system supports. She showed an earlier build of the controller at a festival in Brooklyn in 2009. Back then, it was sound only and would generate different notes based on how the participants were kissing. She remembers that even relative strangers would get up to see if they made sweet music or a dissonant cacophony.

Like normal kissing, there's no exact formula for success. Every couple has their own way of doing it, and the best way to knock down those pins is to cooperate and go with what works. But you do have to move your tongue around at least a little.

"There is really no one rule to play this game better," says Nam. "So one of the things I'm curious about is to see is how people use different techniques to play the game."

It won't accept a quick peck, though -- to roll the ball, you must kiss for 20 seconds.