Some of you may remember when we reported on the 2D Girlfriend, also known as the INBED, a projector that affixes to the ceiling and projects an image of a sleeping body in your bed. Of course, some of you might want an artificial sleeping partner that is a bit more three-dimensional, and that’s why the LightMate was invented.

The LightMate is basically a large pillow with a few warming lamps which are presumably there for the user to feel that he or she is snuggling with a warm body.

Judging from the comments that were posted on the INBED article, there will no doubt be comments on this article saying that the LightMate is “creepy”. My only response to that is this: if you are actively pretending that some inanimate object is a sleeping partner, then yes, that is creepy. However, I know a lot of people who sleep with a body pillow, and nobody thinks that is disturbing, but a simple channeling of our snuggling instinct.

Unfortunately, what designer Francesca Lanzavecchia was attempting with the LightMate was that she wanted to create “soft anthropomorphic pillows”. For those of you who don’t know what anthropomorphic means, it is “the attribution of human form, human characteristics, or human behavior to nonhuman things”.

In this case, it applies to act of pretending a pillow is a sleeping mate. Of course, this is what designer Lanzavecchia was trying to do by creating “a mate to hug or a huge companion you can lay on”. Okay, that’s a little creepy, and I think I’m going to quit now.

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