Sex Toys and Cybersex Are Enhanced by New Technology

Warner Brox. Pictures

ALEX HAWGOOD | The New York Times

Interactive’ Gets a New Meaning

Next-generation sex toys have started to appear in the marketplace.

  • Limon, a sleek lemon-shaped vibrator that could be sold at the MoMA gift store. Released this month by Minna Life, a design firm based in (where else?) San Francisco, it is billed as a tactile “couples’ vibrator” that can record and customize intensity levels.

  • RealTouch, a USB-connected sex toy said to have been designed by a former NASA engineer that promises “interactive sex” with another person over the Internet. It comes in two parts: one modeled after a woman’s lower anatomy, and one modeled after a man’s. Designed to be paired with a webcam, one device captures sensations (using technology that is similar to that of a touch screen) and then transmits it digitally to the other, as if the two were in the same room.

  • LovePalz, a Taiwan company that bills itself as offering “the world’s best interactive toys for Internet love.” Unlike RealTouch, it is wireless, which has its obvious advantages, and comes with hubristic-sounding names that may be a tad hard to live up to: Zeus (for him) and Hera (for her).

  • Fundawear, a pair of his/her underpants with vibrating nodes that can be remotely activated by an iPhone. A YouTube video dramatizing the product, subtitled “touch over the Internet” and “the future of foreplay,” has been viewed more than 6.7 million times since it was published in April.

Social desire feeds technological change.

“The Future of Relationships” makes the case that forward leaps in augmented intelligence and video-game interactivity will let people “get attached to and develop real relationships with their hardware and software.”

Highlights:

  • “long distance foreplay,” in which partners need not be in the same room;

  • “relationship forensics” systems that can comb through a partner’s hookup history;

  • “Teledildonics,” sex toys operated by computer technology;

  • Bedroom data mining that purports to metricize sexual performance and even love.

  • Love Plus, a dating-simulation game developed for the portable Nintendo DS console.

  • Spreadsheets, an iPhone app that purports to measure whether one is good or bad in bed by logging the bumping and grinding captured through a smartphone’s internal accelerometer and microphone. It has been downloaded more than 8,000 times in over 115 countries since being released in August.

Read the whole story at The New York Times