[This story from Forbes suggests that with patent issues resolved, products and online services that offer sexual experiences via virtual reality (‘teledildonics’) may finally succeed in the marketplace; of course that success will in large part depend on the extent and nature of the presence illusions they provide. The original version of the story includes more pictures and a 0:56 minute video. –Matthew]
This VR Platform Invites Users To Have Virtual Sex With Real Performers
Janet Burns, Contributor
Jul 21, 2016
A popular cam site is hoping that our brave new world of high-tech lovin’ has plenty of people in it that want virtual ‘sex’ with cam models. Next month, CamSoda is launching a new virtual-reality (VR) platform that will allow patrons to physically ‘interact’ with performers via teledildonics, a.k.a. connected and coordinating sex toys–technology that’s long been bound by patent law, but which soon may finally be let loose.
The site aims to give visitors the fuller VR experience thanks to ’female’- and ‘male’-designed stimulators from Kiiroo, which feed “pressure data” from a female performer’s toy to a remote viewer’s responsive male masturbator, or ‘sleeve,’ in real time. According to the company, “This replicates a real life experience creating pulsating vibrations on each end with each person.” CamSoda president Daron Lundeen explained in a press release, “We want to provide our users with a unique experience that constantly stimulates their imagination.”
CamSoda already maintains a house-ful of brick-and-mortar chat rooms for VR-ready and more traditional performances, and promises to staff “a diverse team of models to entertain viewers at all times” with the new platform’s launch. Tech-savvy fans of the site can also look forward to weekly “special events,” the company boasts, “pushing the limits of virtual reality and bringing the user into the models’ world.”
In addition to previously unknown realms of self-pleasure, perhaps, the platform’s launch may herald an era of new action in the teledildonics industry after years of drought. Over the past decade or so, sex-tech innovators such as FriXion, Vibease, LovePalz, OhMiBod, and Comingle have found their various forays into teledildonics blocked by a wide-ranging patent on such technology, Ars Technica explains. As The Verge points out, however, the rights held by one HasSex, Inc.–”[which] seems to have been created solely for the purpose of licensing this very patent,” according to the tech news site–is nearing its end.
The service launches August 1, and would-be participants can get the gear they’ll need for remote stimulation from CamSoda’s site. If VR cam sex doesn’t pan out, of course, users can still utilize their Kiiroo Onyx or Pearl device for remote encounters with real-life partners, and with other strangers and performers via Kiiroo’s own platforms (no word yet on female-focused virtual sessions in the CamSoda House). According to Engadget, the company’s current VR platform (sans teledildonics) leaves a fair bit to be desired, and has encountered such mood-altering glitches as connection problems, stream lags, and even a cameo from “a large, male crew member [stepping] on set to adjust a piece of equipment.”
Only time and perhaps biofeedback data will tell whether such remote-controlled ‘mutual’ masturbation plays a big role in future sexuality, but the platform may have critics of VR-overload worrying in the mean time that maybe T.S. Eliot was wrong–that our world does, in fact, end with a bang.
[h/t Mic]