Scottish boffins have come up with a gizmo which allows couples who are apart for any reason to have something that approximates to sex.

Moray-based technology laboratory, Distance Lab, hopes to find three couples willing to test the gizmo which has the entirely unsexy name Mutsugoto. Stefan Agamanolis, one of its three developers hopes to find couples where one partner lives in the capital while the other, who will be given a portable device, lives a few hundred miles away.

He said that the device was designed to communicate intimacy and to offer an alternative to text and e-mail messaging. It works like this.  While a couple are lying in bed they wear touch-activated rings visible to a camera mounted above them. A computer tracks the movement of the ring as one of the device's users passes it across their own body, or bed.

These strokes are transmitted to and projected in beams of light on the body of their partner. The lines change colour if they cross. Nope, it does not sound like a substitute unless you had never done the real thing.