Hugvie: A medium that fosters love

We introduce a communication medium that encourages users to fall in love with their counterparts. Hugvie, the huggable tele-presence medium, enables users to feel like hugging their counterparts while chatting. In this paper, we report that when a participant talks to his communication partner during their first encounter while hugging Hugvie, he mistakenly feels as if they are establishing a good relationship and that he is being loved rather than just being liked.