Teledildonics article - Want to Have Sex With Your Favorite Porn Star? "Teledildonics
 

A middling article, the more interesting stuff is in the middle of the article like this snip:

http://www.alternet.org/story/147253...make_it_happen

The concept of physical surprise isn’t something that’s been achievable without a sentient partner until now, and it's likely to confuse us simple humans for some time until our brains catch up and assimilate the advancement of technology.

I wasn’t kidding about the way this invention exploits the permeability of the barrier between fantasy and reality. While this is unmistakably not a "real" sexual contact between performer and viewer, many of the very basic things that distinguish porn from the real thing are rendered moot. You might even consider this a kind of "reality plus," where all the sensations of sexuality are wrapped up with the bonus feature of actually watching it happen at the same time. Amateur porn hounds have been engaging in this particular mixture of the sensual and visual ever since video cameras allowed live feeds onto monitors so that watching yourself boink no longer required mirrors, but the self-consciousness (or narcissism; your flavor may vary) in watching yourself fuck is absent in the video-plus-toy scenario. Whether that's good or bad is a matter of taste, but that it changes everything is undeniable.

Consider this particularly trippy factoid: RealTouch, a company hawking a Fleshlight-like toy that synchs up with porn clips, has begun encoding "classic" celebrity videos. You can engage in virtual bonking with Paris Hilton, or Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee. It’s more or less the sex-tech version of the short-lived fad using computer-generated images of dead celebrities in commercials: undeniably compelling and yet slightly brain-hurting as well. It’s impossible to imagine that the celebrities caught up in a sex-tape scandal (whether engineered or not) in the 1990s could have ever imagined becoming the heart of a sexual experience involving some of the most cutting-edge interactive haptics available.

Haptics?

Yes, haptics. What sounds like a new slur against hipsters or the latest diet craze is actually a field of technology devoted to tactile feedback. It’s been used for decades in everything from aircraft to robotics, and is now at the forefront of virtual reality innovation.

It reads like it's something out of the movie Being John Malkovich.

I've always visualized a guy using Real Touch looking like he is screwing a watermelon.

My dad always told me "son, do NOT eat the watermelons with holes in them..."

The stupidest thing aebn ever did was making the realtouch proprietary.

The first company that makes an open haptic cock-pussy combo will make a mint and brand itself industry leader.

not that that will help us here in our industry.

A watermelon wouldn't be proprietary.

Isn't that what Thrillhammer was attempting to do?

Maybe, but a "museum quality" fucking machine pretty much sets itself so far off the consumer market that it might as well not exist except possibly as a proof-of-concept.

Tho, the size of that thing does illustrate some of the problems with building a practical consumer virtual sex interface.

And its just a cock, to fit the virtual marketplace, which is the real market for these things, you need a cock-pussy combo.

There are a few "web enabled" dildos - but they are close to pointless, and their interface is clumsy - so I've been told, I never wanted to plunk down $150-250 for something whose specs sounded lame to begin with, just to see what the interface was like.

Not long ago I heard secondlifes xcite cocks and pussies now have some kind of lomg-distance interface - but I don't know what real sextoys they can control.

Advanced haptics are still pretty much lab curiousities, so I can imagine we dont have the tech yet to make a cock-pussy interactive combo.

But the real market for these things isn't porn movies with embedded code to drive a fancy fleshlight, its as a long-distance sex interface between real people.

Bill, how we bring a thing to market isn't always how it is for the life of the market.

Yeah, this is right on track with what he is currently working on actually. I should hit him up about the thread so he can elaborate.