Things were getting weird last week when the cheerful game developer and digital media artist Hye Yeon Nam started gluing a sensor to her tongue, weirder still when she had me glue one to mine.
There I was, a couple of hundred paces from the massive PlayStation and Nintendo exhibitions at the E3 circus of new video games, standing in the Indiecade booth where, nearby, people were playing a live-action turn-based ninja version of tag. Hye Yeon Nam was going to show me how her kiss controller worked. And now I had a sensor on my tongue, she had a sensor on her tongue and.... no... this wasn't about to happen, was it?
The video atop this story shows what happened.
Our misunderstanding was brief, though my temporary discomfort during this live demonstration here of Hye Yeon's kiss controller probably comes through in the shake of the camera. Two people do kiss while using the kiss controller, as she demonstrated, in order to control a bowling game. She air-kissed a strange-looking harness to show how it works. We had show the Kiss Controller here on Kotaku before but never demoed live. What had begun as a wedding present made it to E3 to wrest the title of Most Unusual Game Controller from the Wii U.
For more information about the Kiss Controller, check out Hye Yeon Nam's website.
And, for the record, after the interview ended I discovered that I'd swallowed the sensor. Whoops!