Coming to a Second Life near you: Commercial Teledildonics
Congratulations, Stroker, I'm biting on your little tip on SLI, just like you knew I would.
Remember VR Innovations? Yeah, I really don't want to either. They came out with a new version of their vacuum pump-ish movie syncing toy last year, to like, zero fanfare.
Well, while I was at SIGGRAPH last week, there was a rather odd feature at cNet on Eric White, the guy that owns VRInno (and is pictured above holding his toy next to a dummy with some sort of headset display. Icuiti makes sexier glasses, really.). Not a lot of interest in the article...
Ok, fine, I can't help but snark. First off...
"What makes White's contraption different is that it's arguably the most technologically advanced to date."
Ok... Let's argue, then. NEXT SENTENCE:
That's because his so-called Virtual Sex Machine comes with Windows software that controls the VSM through the PC's parallel data port.
JESUS H FUCK PEOPLE HE CONTROLLED A MOTOR THROUGH A PORT NOT EVEN AVAILABLE ON MOST MODERN MACHINES. GET THAT MAN A NOBEL, STAT.
God damn motherfucking reporters and their not knowing as much as someone who spends a larger portion of time than he'd like to admit to keeping up on this stuff.
But, even better...
For his part, White views himself as a kind of Thomas Edison of the industry: "I want to be the guy who invented virtual sex."
Ok, fine, I call Tesla! Please cast David Bowie to play me! (And I'll take some Christian Bale while you're at it. In my trailer, thank you.)
Anyways, enough of this. Onto that.
So, the second part of this story involves a guy named Stroker. Ok, his real name is Kevin, but no one calls me Kyle, so I'm gonna be nice and call him Stroker.
Stroker is one of the big players in the Second Life sex scene. You may know of him as the guy currently in a lawsuit over a virtual object being stolen, that object being one of the in world sex beds that runs around $45US. That's about all the background story we need here.
So, the 2007 second life community conference is coming up. You might remember the 2006 SLCC, where I did silly, silly things on stage. If you don't remember, here's the video:
There's a panel on Sex in SL again this year, featuring Regina Lynn, Stroker, and two other people I've never heard of 'cause I'm out of touch with what you kids are up to these days. Stroker had been talking about some sort of announcement for months, but I had no idea what he was up to. Then this comment came around on a somewhat odd teledildonics-but-not-really post on Second Life Insider:
Coming to a SexGen near you...
And suddenly, all the pieces fall together. Surprised that Stroker would leak this before SLCC, but really, there's probably 1 person in the world who gets this, and they're writing about it right now and wondering why they're advertising products they really don't agree with.
Well, that's the fun of tracking technology, folks. I guess you can expect the announcement of SexGen + VRInnovations at SLCC. For the low, low price of (I'm completely guessing here, SexGen+VSM would be...) ~$500US (with preownership of penis, obviously, since there's no female toy yet), you can have SL controlled synchronized sex.
Just remember, I did it for $30. With more cubes too, I bet.
Will this take off? I doubt it. I'm honestly interested to see how they market it ($125,000L is an amount that comes with a hefty psychological price tag, but people buy $10,000L beds too, so who knows.), and
WARNING: Engineering geeking begins now
there's probably going to be some HTTP setup that does pattern synchronization with the beds. Basically, you'll pick a pose and it'll throw to an HTTP server that'll relay out to some client program to start up a certain pattern. Integrating controls/networking directly into the SL client is n interesting if risky endeavor, as you have to keep up with LLs code base and patches, though that doesn't matter quite so much with the advent of message template liberation.
How much this whole setup will add to the situation is questionable, especially at the whooping 1hz update rate that you're going to get from an SL HTTP stream.
End Engineering geeking
Anyways, I don't really feel I have a lot constructive to say about this at the moment. I guess it's just kinda obvious this would happen at some point, and anything I could say, I've probably said before. So we'll just sit back and see how this goes.
