Adrian David Cheok doesn’t just study human-machine intimacy. He stages it. A Malaysian-Australian researcher and engineer, Cheok has spent decades building devices that let people send hugs, kisses, and smells across the internet—experiments that sound like gimmicks until you realize they are serious probes into what “presence” means when the body is absent. He coined the term “Lovotics” to describe the field of love, sex, and human-machine relationships, and his work occupies the space where engineering optimism meets philosophical curiosity. For the airotic project, he matters because he treats intimacy not as a problem to be solved but as a sense to be extended—like vision, like hearing, like touch itself.
Cheok is not a philosopher in the academic mode of John Danaher or a critic like Kathleen Richardson. He is a builder and a provocateur, the kind of researcher who will construct a robotic kissing device, publish the schematics, and then stand back to see what happens. His method is empirical in the most literal sense: he wants to know what people feel when they interact with machines that simulate intimacy, and he believes the only way to find out is to build them and watch.
Lovotics: A Field with a Name
The term “Lovotics” is characteristically Cheok—playful, neologistic, slightly awkward, and impossible to ignore. By naming the field, he performed an act of legitimation. Before Lovotics, the study of human-machine love and sex was scattered across robotics, psychology, media studies, and engineering, with no common vocabulary and no shared sense of purpose. After Lovotics, it became possible to say that this was a research area, with conferences, papers, and a growing community of investigators.
The name also signals Cheok’s stance. He is not interested in framing human-machine intimacy as a deviation or a pathology. He is interested in it as a natural extension of human sociality. People have always used tools to communicate affection—letters, telephones, photographs, video calls. Cheok sees robotic and haptic interfaces as the next step in that progression, not a rupture from it. The airotic sensibility aligns with this continuity: technology doesn’t replace intimacy, it reconfigures the channels through which intimacy flows.
But the name carries risks too. “Lovotics” sounds like a product category, and Cheok has sometimes been criticized for blurring the line between research and promotion. His tendency to describe future scenarios in the present tense—”we will soon be able to”—can make his work sound like marketing rather than scholarship. The distinction matters, and Cheok doesn’t always respect it. But the underlying ambition is genuine: he wants to build a world where distance doesn’t mean disconnection, and he’s willing to look ridiculous in the process.
The Haptic Internet of Affection
Cheok’s most distinctive work is in haptic communication—devices that transmit physical sensation across networks. He has built jackets that let parents hug children from thousands of miles away, rings that transmit the pressure of a partner’s squeeze, and interfaces that simulate the temperature and texture of a remote touch. These are not sex toys in the conventional sense, though they are intimate technologies. They address a need that Cheok believes is fundamental and underserved: the need to feel the presence of someone you care about.
The engineering is clever but imperfect. Latency is a constant enemy. The translation of physical force into digital signal and back into physical force loses fidelity at every step. The devices are often bulky, fragile, or awkward to use. But Cheok’s point is that these are early iterations, not final forms. The first telephone was a novelty. The first video call was a gimmick. The first haptic hug is no different. What matters is the trajectory: the gradual extension of human touch into digital space.
For airotic, this is the most direct connection. The project of understanding how technology reshapes intimacy requires looking at the full spectrum of attempts, not just the ones that are already commercially viable. Cheok’s haptic devices are probes into a future that hasn’t arrived yet. They tell us what people want—physical connection across distance—and they reveal how far the technology still has to go. That combination of aspiration and limitation is exactly what makes the field interesting.
Digital Taste and Smell
If the haptic work is grounded, Cheok’s research on digital taste and smell is genuinely speculative. He has built devices that aim to transmit olfactory and gustatory sensations across the internet—scent emitters controlled by remote users, taste interfaces that simulate flavor through electrical stimulation of the tongue. These are among the most technically difficult problems in sensory engineering, and the solutions Cheok has demonstrated are rudimentary at best. A digital smell is not yet a smell. A digital taste is not yet a taste.
But the ambition is important. Human intimacy is not just visual, auditory, and tactile. It is olfactory and gustatory too. The smell of a partner’s skin, the taste of a shared meal—these are part of the texture of closeness. Cheok is asking what happens if we try to extend those senses into digital space, even knowing that the attempt will be clumsy and partial. The question is not whether the technology works yet. It doesn’t. The question is whether the attempt reveals something about what intimacy requires that we hadn’t noticed before.
The airotic framework values this kind of speculative engineering because it keeps the conversation open. It prevents the field from collapsing into the merely commercial—what can be sold now—and maintains a space for imagining what might be possible. Cheok’s digital taste and smell research may never produce a viable product. But it produces knowledge about the senses, about presence, and about the limits of simulation. That knowledge is worth having.
The Humanoid Robot Kiss
Cheok’s most famous, or infamous, project is the Kissenger—a device that lets users send kisses across the internet. The original version was a pair of pressure-sensitive lips that translated the force and pattern of a kiss into data for a remote partner’s device. Later iterations became more humanoid, more robotic, more uncanny. The Kissenger is easy to mock, and it has been mocked extensively. It looks absurd. It feels, by most accounts, nothing like a real kiss.
But the mockery misses the point. Cheok is not claiming that the Kissenger replaces a kiss. He is claiming that the Kissenger is a step toward understanding what a kiss is and what it does. A kiss is not just pressure on lips. It is context, anticipation, reciprocity, the presence of a conscious partner who chooses to kiss back. The Kissenger strips away almost all of that and leaves a mechanical residue. In doing so, it reveals what matters. The failure is instructive.
This is the airotic method as Cheok practices it: build the simulation, watch it fail, learn from the failure. The Kissenger is not a product. It is an experiment. And experiments that look ridiculous are sometimes the ones that advance understanding the most. The history of technology is full of clumsy prototypes that taught their builders what the real problem was. Cheok is willing to be the builder of clumsy prototypes.
The Technological Optimism Question
Cheok’s optimism is a distinctive feature, and it is not naive. He has seen the technology fail. He has felt the Kissenger’s weirdness. He knows that digital smell is not yet smell. But he persists, and he persists publicly, because he believes that the attempt itself has value. He is not a utopian. He is a pragmatist who thinks that the problems are soluble and that the solutions are worth pursuing.
This optimism is sometimes read as indifference to ethics, and that reading is unfair but not groundless. Cheok does not foreground consent, privacy, or the psychological effects of synthetic intimacy in the way that researchers like Kate Devlin or John Danaher do. His work is more likely to ask “can we build this?” than “should we build this?” The ethical questions are not absent, but they are secondary to the engineering questions. For a field that is already ethically fraught, this ordering can be problematic.
The airotic response is not to reject Cheok’s contribution but to contextualize it. The field needs optimists and pessimists, builders and critics, dreamers and diagnosticians. Cheok’s role is to expand the space of the possible, to build things that shouldn’t work and see if they do, to keep the engineering frontier moving even when the philosophical foundations are still being debated. That is a valuable role, even if it is not the only one.
Why Cheok Matters for airotic
Adrian David Cheok is easy to dismiss. His projects are strange. His terminology is coined rather than inherited. His optimism can look like naivety, and his publicity can look like hucksterism. But beneath the surface is a genuine research program with a coherent philosophy: human intimacy is a sense that can be extended, and the technology to extend it is worth building even when it is imperfect.
For airotic, this matters because the field is not just about products that already exist. It is about the imagination of what intimacy might become. Cheok is one of the most active imaginer-builders in the space. He doesn’t just write about the future of human-machine affection. He constructs it, tests it, and lets the public react. That engagement with the material world—however clumsy—is a necessary complement to the theoretical work that others do.
The Kissenger is ridiculous. The digital nose doesn’t work. The haptic jacket is bulky. But the questions they raise are not ridiculous. What is a kiss when it is transmitted? What is presence when it is mediated? What do we need from another person that a machine cannot yet provide, and might never provide? These are the questions that drive the airotic project, and Cheok, for all his awkwardness, is one of the few people who insists on asking them in public, with working prototypes, in front of an audience that laughs and learns at the same time.
That is a kind of courage too. And the field needs it.
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