Exploring the frontiers of erotic technology

With the sex tech industry getting more attention, and consumers fascinated by stories of robots and gadgets and wifi-connected butt plugs, there’s a huge opportunity here. And where sex toy companies are – to some extent – hampered by consumer expectations, events like the sex tech hack highlight just how exciting the future can be. Not just better versions of the toys we’re used to, but sex toys that make us examine the edges of what we enjoy, and give us a new way to explore pleasure.

It’s a sex robot, but not as you know it: exploring the frontiers of erotic technology

Sex tech isn’t all just ‘realistic’ robots and wifi-enabled marital aids. Girl on the Net reports from the innovative and surreal Goldsmith’s sex tech hack showcase

In an old church somewhere in South London, senior computing lecturer Dr Kate Devlin lies down on top of a sleeping bag and submits to a hug from a robot. But it doesn’t look how you’d imagine a robot to look: it has no face, no hands, and none of the porny characteristics common to sex robots we see in the mainstream media. It’s a pile of plastic inflatable tubes on top of a sleeping bag, which wrap around you and pulse with air – squeezing and hugging whoever has been brave enough to lie down and try it. In my opinion it’s one of the sexiest things to come out of the Goldsmith’s sex tech hack.

Although only in its second year, the sex tech hack has already managed to throw out ideas that radically challenge the way we think about sex and tech. Broadly, the products we’re used to seeing on sale offer a recognisable upgrade to our current sex toys – vibrators that connect over the internet to allow long-distance play, or sex robots which are basically sex dolls plus a simple Siri-style AI. But at the sex tech hack, the participants’ vision of the future is altogether more unusual: exploring the edges of sensual pleasure, and taking a new look at how we communicate intimately.

The sex “robot” that Dr Devlin was testing came from the imaginations of team Sense Me – they wanted to create a machine that didn’t feel like a machine: something soft that could envelop you in a hug. The inflatable plastic straps wrapped around the user, squeezing and pulsating, to give a sense of comfort and restraint.

Team SucCUMb explored the idea of full-body touch too, encouraging people to explore the detail of their own bodies the way they’d explore the details of an intimate partner. The product they prototyped combined augmented reality with multiple tiny vibration motors. The user would lie on a bed, looking up at a screen, where they’d see their own body in a different environment – think American Beauty, with actress Mena Suvari lying naked on a bed of falling rose petals. As the rose petals “drop” from the screen, the user feels tiny vibrations on their body. To heighten the sense that your body is not your own, they also played moaning sounds to the user, simultaneously triggering a vibrator on their throat, to make them feel as if the noises were coming from their own mouth, giving the user the strange feeling of having their pleasure led by a machine.

In a similar vein, Team Fake It ‘Til You Make It explored the ways in which sex noises can enhance our experience. While there’s no hard and fast rule about what people will enjoy in bed, many of us get off more intensely if we can either make noise ourselves, or hear a partner vocally enjoying it. As the team put it: do we moan because we like it, or do we like it because we moan? The answer appears to be “a bit of both”. They trained a neural network using audio porn, and programmed a vibrator to respond with more intense vibrations when it heard what it identified as a moan.

So far we’ve mostly talked about solo sex, but one of the key themes the teams were invited to explore was intimacy, which doesn’t always have to be physical, after all. I was particularly taken with Touch Pairing – an app which would pair phone screens, and display your touch gestures to another phone via colourful trails of light. The person you’d paired with could then trace your gestures back to you, and share a fingertip touch over a long distance.

Other teams focused on current problems within the world of sex toys and products: team Softdongs identified an issue with packers, which are soft silicone penises worn to give yourself a bulge. But off-the-shelf it’s not always easy to find a packer that suits your body and style. This team built a tool that would allow you to design your own packer, then look at it from all angles in a virtual environment, and 3D print a mould to create your own out of silicone. “VR Sexperiments” created a series of virtual reality games that allowed users to do sexual things in a virtual world. They ranged from the curious (watching a disembodied dildo run up and down your own virtual arm, while the real-life operator ran his finger along the same line, a sexy virtual demonstration of the rubber hand illusion) to the sensual (stick this controller in your belt and pleasure this virtual robot). It’s easy to see how virtual reality could allow us to live out fantasies that would be impossible in the real world. In the virtual world, I had a penis with which I could pleasure my robotic companion. Equally I could change my body to make me larger, smaller, or completely different in some other respect. Ever wanted to have sex with a cartoon tentacle monster? In virtual reality, you can make that dream come true.

Other projects explored things like fetishisation of objects, how to encourage people to pay for porn, or how to improve bedroom communication using gesture recognition. Last year’s ideas featured everything from a peacock tail that responded to physical arousal, a bra that output different colours depending on how turned on you were, and a robot that wrote its own porn.

Everything the teams came up with was created over a weekend, and although most of the projects will never come to market, all of them demonstrated that new tech can help us radically reimagine the way we give and receive pleasure. Why is it that the things they created look so unlike some of the sex toys we see on the market today? Partly, I suspect, it’s because of the difference in the brief. Sex toy companies (barring some of the more innovative ones – a couple of which sponsored the hack itself) are generally looking to do “the same, but better” – creating more powerful vibrators, more intense masturbation sheaths, etcetera. They’re also driven by the market – in which consumers are wary of something that looks wildly different to what they’re used to. But the sex tech hack is a window into what’s possible when we’re not chained to ideas we’ve had in the past. When we’re not seeing “sex robots” as humanoid women or “sex toys” as things you just rub on your genitals.

With the sex tech industry getting more attention, and consumers fascinated by stories of robots and gadgets and wifi-connected butt plugs, there’s a huge opportunity here. And where sex toy companies are – to some extent – hampered by consumer expectations, events like the sex tech hack highlight just how exciting the future can be. Not just better versions of the toys we’re used to, but sex toys that make us examine the edges of what we enjoy, and give us a new way to explore pleasure.

Find out more about the Goldsmith’s sex tech hack on their website, and follow Hacksmiths on Twitter.

By: https://www.theguardian.com/science/brain-flapping/2017/dec/01/its-a-sex-robot-but-not-as-you-know-it-exploring-the-frontiers-of-erotic-technology