iBrator: Romantic app lets you "touch" other people through your iPhone

You’ll remember of course, the poke function on Facebook. Everyone always talked about it, but nobody really used it because it was kind of rubbish and the only actual effect of poking was to show up a little graphic of a finger in one corner of your screen. Boring.

Well, meet the iBrator. It’s one of the prettiest iPhone apps I’ve seen this year and it lets you make a connection to anyone else with an iPhone using the app. And it’s more than just a message – you kind of can touch them – iBrator will actually vibrate their phone so that it actually imitates the touches that you made on the screen – long touch, long vibration, two short touches – two short vibrations.

They can also see how your finger has traced over your screen, ’cause the patterns you draw on your iPhone show up in little flaming lines which can be accompanied by the vibrations or by sounds (if you turn the sound on).

Then the patterns on screen sort of melt away, like an actual touch does.

It’s quite a romantic little app.

It does sound kind of rude obviously, I suppose you could use it like that. But mostly it’s just quite pretty. And lets face it, probably says something about modern society.

We’re all hyper-tuned to the touch of a vibrating phone these days and the tug it has on our attention is really comparable to someone touching your arm, or err, upper leg in the pocket area where your phone usually is. You know what we mean. It IS like your phone touches you when you get a text message. We’re going to stop talking about this now..

iBrator is from the same developer – Sion Fletcher – who did the “make your own music video” app that BBC Click picked up on, called Light Graffiti. And it’s another pretty, arty application with a similar idea. We like it.

iBrator, £0.59 on iTunes