Imagine this: You come home after a long, tiring day. You walk up to a machine on your wall that looks something like a clock, with a display of a cartoon-like face in the center. A few moments later, a catchy, peppy song starts playing—and you start to feel a little better.

This scenario could someday become reality, thanks to an "emotional radio" called Solo, created by the design and innovation company Uniform.

So how does it work? "When you approach it, the pictogram face shows a neutral expression," writes Adrian Lacey for the BBC. "But it then takes a photo of your face, a rod or antenna on the side cranks into life, and the LCD display indicates that it's thinking." Uniform's senior creative technologist, Mike Shorter, says this process involves "analyzing different features of your face and deciding how happy, sad, or angry you are. … It will then start to reflect your mood through music."

It's all part of what's called "affective computing," the "study of how to make computers and machines more empathetic." And Solo is not a lonely empathetic piece of tech: "[E]xamples of supposedly emotionally intelligent gadgets have been springing up around the world," from Japan to MIT.

Potential Preaching Angles: Relationships; Intimacy; Friendship; God, presence of—Self-driving cars, VR glasses, and emotion-reading tech—even though such innovations are still "in-progress," it's easy to marvel at what human ingenuity can accomplish. But let's never forget what the deepest longings of the human heart—a desire for connection or intimacy with God and with others.