For Valentine's Day, Stephanie Gerson is meeting her boyfriend for a glass of wine and dessert, but she won't be able to share bites, cuddle or smooch with him.
That's because the Berkeley grad student is scheduling a videoconference teledate with her New York-based significant other -- and she's inviting you to join in.
"It's about using technology for the purpose of intimacy," said Gerson. "We have to get creative to connect."
This Thursday, Gerson, along with her professors at the UC Berkeley Center for New Media, is hosting a social experiment in what she calls "tele-intimacy." Bay Area-residents with a long-distance partner can participate in the session -- all they need is a web cam-enabled laptop and an hour of free time. After arriving at Gerson's Berkeley lab, the participants will connect with their long-distance lovers via individual video conference calls. Gerson also plans to serve chocolate desserts to her volunteers to facilitate a romantic, Valentine's Day ambiance.
Gerson's small-scale experiment is part of a larger boom in online dating geared at the Web 2.0 crowd.
Internet dating sites that rely on social networking and web video are surging in popularity: since launching last year group-oriented video chat site WooMe has facilitated upward of 300,000 introductions, fast-paced video date site SpeedDate has hosted more than 500,000 speed dates and YouTube-like dating service Say-hey-hey (pictured above) has more than 600 user-submitted video introduction clips from singles, according to the services' representatives.
Web-savvy lonely hearts are in luck -- some researchers think virtual dating could boost matchmaking potential, since video daters know instantaneously if they have that elusive chemistry.
"Within a minute, you know if a person is funny or not, if you two click or not, thanks to social clues like body language," says Michael
Norton, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School in an earlier Wired.com article.
Online dating is a growth industry that JupiterResearch predicts will generate more than $900 million a year in the United States by 2011, and Gerson hopes her efforts can translate to a larger scale service.
"I would love to scale-it up, like a telesingles bar," said Gerson. "I'd get my single friends on video Skype looking cute, flirty and ready to have a drink with anyone who walks by."
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