Slashdong - Sex Tech, Teledildonics, and Whatever Else I Can Make Dirty

qDot goes to Europe. Again.

2010-09-05T11:29:16-07:00

Well, I’m off to Austria and the Netherlands to give some talks and teach some people how to make sex toys!

Paraflows 2010: I am my own XBox
- 10-12. September 2010
- 14:00-19:00 Uhr
- Raum D, QDK, quartier21, MQ, Museumsplatz 1, 1070 Wien

I’ll be speaking at Paraflows about a concept I’ve been working on, of body as game console. Using biometrics equipment, what can we do to make the human body the game mechanic, instead of just augmenting other video games with biometric control?

I think I’m speaking sometime in the midafternoon on Sept 10, will update once I know.

DIY Sex Toys Workshop
- from: 11.00 till 18.00 on Sunday, September 12th
- in: WORM’s future location on Witte de Withstraat 63, Rotterdam
- for: 30 euros including materials
- Register by emailing workshop@moddr.net
- bringing your own laptop is preferred.

Yup. After 5+ years of running slashdong, now it’s time to start passing that knowledge on to others. In this full day intensive workshop, we’ll be building a simple computer controlled vibrator using the arduino, then programming it for different control schemes (audio, network, sensor, etc…) using processing. I’ll probably be doing this workshop in the states sometime after I get back, so don’t worry if you don’t happen to be in Rotterdam next weekend.

Talk at Subotron: Reusing Fun
- 19:00 Friday, September 17th
- Raum D, QDK, quartier21, MQ, Museumsplatz 1, 1070 Wien

I’ll be presenting some of the prototyping work I’ve been doing on my reusing fun project. Here’s the talk abstract:

With each new generation of video games, we see increases in technology, game mechanic complexity, and new styles of play. However, what happens if we take the toys of the past and turn them into game controllers? Or take the newest and most modern game controllers and start applying them to the relics of video game history. “Going Forward in the Backward Direction” is an effort to apply the fun of yesterday to the technology of today, and to take the control and environmental elements that makes video games interesting today and rewind them to see what new elements can be added to history. This talk will outline the projects already created and currently in development, including an overview of the technologies used and new game mechanics created. From self-reconfiguring miniature golf and kite pong to haptic Super Glove Ball and tetris that serves you alcohol, these projects strive to answer the question “how can we reuse fun?”.

Mojowijo - The Wiimote Vibrator, Round 2

2010-08-15T09:41:29-07:00

Mojowijo - The Wiimote Vibrator, Round 2

A few years ago, we posted about the OIOO, a cover for the wiimote that turned it into an adult toy. While that product never went to market completely, it looks like someone else has decided to pick up the idea and run with it. The Mojowijo is apparently a new toy that’s going to be heading for the market soon. from their website, “Using Mojowijo’s patent pending Motion2Vibration technology” (oh lord is that ever gonna run into some prior art from, well, you know, the link earlier in this post, and even if it doesn’t Immersion will have their ass on a platter), you can shake the wiimote, and it will cause the other once to react.

Here’s a demo video.

So yeah, other than the whole patent pending thing (which if true could make this project a non-starter), I’m interested to see where this is going. As with most other products these days, there’s a twitter and facebook account available for updates. They’re also looking for people to beta test, so visit their webpage if you’re interested.

Sputniko! and the Penis Cybernetique

2010-08-12T21:09:29-07:00

Sputniko! and the Penis Cybernetique

I originally found out about Sputniko!, the art site of Hiromi Ozaki, via the oft-referenced-here We Make Money Not Art post about her Crowbot Jenny Project. However, after poking around the site a little bit, I found Penis Cybernetique.

It’s geometry and genetalia, at the same time. I can’t really express the awesomeness in words here.

Penis Cybernetique is a prosthetic penis, build by Sputniko! simply to answer the question, “What’s it like to have a penis?”

The penis moves up and down based on heart rate, so it’s actually like having a real penis, if slighty less accur… Oh, ok, who am I kidding, every guy knows we get hardons constantly due to things much more random than heart rate. So I’m gonna say it’s right on the money in terms of reaction design.

Not only, that, it’s an open source penis! The code is hosted on sourceforge. Awesome. :D

There’s even a version 2 happening, that will use a silicon skin to make for a more organic look and feel.

Other things that might be of interest from the Sputniko! site:

The Menstruation Machine, the story of a boy who builds a machine so that he can feel what the bleeding of menstruation is like, but also for women who may want to feel the event again once menstruation has become obsolete.

Child Producing Machine, a song about wanting to be a cyborg rather than having to deal with menstruation.

IRC #slashdong - Now on Freenode

2010-08-11T20:48:29-07:00

IRC #slashdong - Now on Freenode

I’ve been on IRC for far, far too long. Most of the time these days I can be found hanging around various places on Freenode (#emacs, #acemonstertoys, etc…). However, I just realized, hey! Slashdong is about free stuff! Why not start a channel?

So I did.

There’s now a #slashdong on Freenode.

If you’re not currently using IRC, you may want to try the Quassel Client for all platforms or Colloquy for OS X, though yes, mIRC still exists, too. Of course, none of those will work with my deldo extensions for ERC

Come, enjoy text based chat with me! Or at least make me stop feeling so utterly alone.

Deldo - The Sex Toy and Teledildonics Mode for Emacs

2010-08-02T23:37:19-07:00

Deldo - The Sex Toy and Teledildonics Mode for Emacs

If it weren’t for sex robots, I’d never get laid, ‘cause, well, of this video right here.

Yup. Remember a few years ago when we had a finger interface to the trancevibe? I decided to kick that up a notch and take the environment I love to new, questionable heights.

Deldo is a vibrator control package for emacs. Currently, it just works with Trancevibrator compatible toys, but it’d be very easy to move this to other toys.

With Deldo, you can trigger vibration on anything that can have a hook in emacs, which is just about everything. Spelling corrections, compilation errors, recieving email, whatever it is, it can vibrate or shock or thrust or whatever now.

The source is available on my github account, http://github.com/qdot/deldo

Erotic HCI at NordiCHI 2010

2010-06-15T21:49:29-07:00

Erotic HCI Workshop at NordiCHI 2010 Call For Papers

Who wants to go to Iceland and talk about sex with computers? I do! I do!

Much like the Sexual Interactions Workshop at SIGCHI 2006, the Erotic HCI Workshop at NordiCHI 2010 will be a day long workshop on sex and human/computer interaction. The call for papers is currently up, and papers are due by August 1. Topics include:

New designs and interfaces
Original user research and empirical studies
Critical essays that explore relations between cultural theory and human-computer sexual interaction
Theories, models, and frameworks for the design and evaluation of systems to support erotic life
Case studies
Inter-, multi-, and transdisciplinary research on erotic life and HCI

The 2006 workshop was awesome, and I expect this one to be just as good!

A bunch of links - 2010-05-10 Edition

2010-05-10T22:49:10-07:00

I never really wanted to get to the point on this site where I just reposted a bunch of links. However, I now find myself in the situation where I have a bunch of links, most of which are gleened from watching the word ‘teledildonics’ on twitter, and none of which I feel like writing a full post about. So, here we are.

Emotion Jackets

Yup, it’s that time again. Asian universities were making hug jackets years ago, and now it’s starting to show up again.

The Philips Emotion Jacket, from the team that brought you the now spun off amBX system (and remember, there’s always libambx for your cross-platform, use it because it validates my hobbies needs!) has now made a haptic jacket so you can feel punches.

Nothing new, but the amount of actuators is far more than the Third Space Vest that I’ve talked about before but can’t seem to find the posts on. So, if you’re into getting punched, you’re about to get more choice in the technology you use to simulate that punch over long distances.

But of course, not everyone is into getting punched. For these people, who I will from this point forward refer to as ‘wusses’, there’s yet another hug jacket because the idea hasn’t been done to death yet, really. Except this one works in second life, and gives you more than just hugs. Presented at the Augmented Human International Conference last month (why was I not at this?), the iFeel_IM! jacket allows you to apply pressure to it, which then relays itself via the network (in this specific instance, Second Life) to another person. Now, I’ve seen this versions of this done for chickens, by student groups and artists, etc… for years now, but it always seems to come back around and get some fanfare, and a couple of new features. For instance, this one generates heat, and can apparently also simulate “tingling” feelings. I’m not sure I agree with the idea of needing an external warmth generator to feel glad to see someone via an online communications context, as if you know the person or at least persona is there, you’re gonna get that anyways, no extra technology required. It’s why people can still fap to text sex just fine.

And therefore, the surprising quote from the article…

“While he could have added a mechanism for sexual arousal, Tsetserukou decided doing so would ultimately distract from his focus on emotion boosting.”

Well, less competition for me, I guess.

For more on emotional clothing, I once again highly recommend the Talk2MyShirt blog

Scary Sex Toy Fridays

Image pretty much says it all, there. Scary Sex Toy Friday is a fun sex toy review blog that just has scary shit on it. Not usually all that technology related, but there’s a certain art to making things you put in yourself, and a lot of times, it’s a damn hilarious art.

Sex Toy Design

Good Magazine has an interesting article on sex toy design. It’s the usual American “Let’s Dance around JimmyJane as the one saving grace of sex toy design” when companies like Tenga in Japan have been working on interesting designs for years too, but hey, this is a links post, so I’m trying to be subjective.

Stupidity

Ever wondered what the Teledildonics article on wikipedia sounds like when read out loud?

Well, now you can find out.

I really need to learn to say “Teledildonics” the way the reader does.

Best Unboxing Ever

2010-04-26T23:00:11-07:00

There’s a certain set of us out there that sort of have, um, problems when we get new things. We like to open them. Not just the box, but whatever’s in the box, and whatever’s in that. Unboxings and uncasings are nothing new these days. Sometimes you just want to take things apart and see what makes them tick.

And sometimes, it’s a box with a $7000 sex doll.

And, sometimes, you just take something, something that was already fun, and you make it even more fun. Like scalping your real doll and putting in an Interactive Fleshlight.

And then you take the after care pictures.

I love running this site.

Thanks to deusbot for sending in the modification photos and making my god damn year.

Tactile Mind - Haptic Porn

2010-04-25T23:30:19-07:00

Prefacing this with credit, I found this thanks to a post by Cory Silverberg, and you should totally visit the store he helps run, Come As You Are, because it’s awesome.

I usually concentrate on technological advancements in porn here, but this book caught my eye due to the interesting questions of sensation and perception.

Normally, when people think of porn, it’s audio or visual stimulus. Magazines, movies, et cetera. When we talk about haptics in relation to teledildonics and sex technology, it’s usually accompanying game, webcam, or movie synchronized toys. These technologies combine haptics with the aforementioned delivery methods, to augment them instead of standing on their own.

So what’s the stand alone haptic equivilent of Playboy/Playgirl? That’s what Tactile Mind, a book of erotic textures, seems to be trying to find out. Basically, it’s images that’ve been texturized so that they can be felt instead of seen.

Above: Sample image, “Naked Woman with Birthday Streamers”

I’ve always been interested in pure haptic representations of scenes like this. If you close your eyes and just feel something, what do you expect out of it? The questions of texture, temperature, size, and other qualities are just huge and unanswered. There’s relatively little we achieve with haptic stimulation through technological means right now (we’ve been happy with vibrational force feedback for 20+ years now, after all, and we’re just getting to multitouch…), most of which are geared toward controls. There’s been lots of talk about things like mood sensing braclets and hug jackets, both then and now (Side note: Talk To My Shirt is a great place for news on stuff like that), but those involving clothing, other people, other senses, and technology. I’m rather fascinated by the naturalness of this, and how effective it is versus whatever other nerdy means we might come up with.

The book itself is a bit more expensive ($225CDN for 17 pages) than your run of the mill porn mag, but that’s to be expected for the hand-crafting time that goes into thermoform book publishing, I’m sure. You can also order single plates from the website for $25CDN.

In which qDot reveals how much of a nerd he is...

2010-04-18T22:52:09-07:00

Sure. It’s been months since I’ve posted anything anywhere near relevant to the topic of the blog. It’s been a slow newsyear (Rubbot died, RealTouch doesn’t suck, sex doll robot thing at AVN was fucking stupid, the end). But today, well, today just begged for a post. There’s just too much nerd goodness here to not pass on.

First off, it’s been announced that the MMORPG Runes of Magic will contain same sex marriages. Pretty cool, forward thinking stuff, I guess, except that the idea was around in door games and text worlds fucking forever ago and do you have any IDEA of the shit you can marry in Second Life (and by marry I mean marry as well as, you know, “marry”) but whatever let’s just act like computers didn’t exist before World of Warcraft. Anyways, the cool part is that it brought up this article:

Managing Same Sex Relationships in Relational Databases

Yes, it’s a multi-page, 14-part article on managing database schema normalization for same-sex relationships. I wonder if E.F. Codd had this in mind for revision 3 of his rules.

And, while we’re on the topic of nerdy sex things, I present you with:

The Most Awkwardly Named Function in Matlab

Any time you have to spoogemop another engineer’s Matlab code, now you know which function to use.

And in case you aren’t aware, via the qDot dictionary:

spoogemop - verb - To clean up the code of another engineer who has decided that their programming style should resemble violent, messy masturbation, using the language as their own personal fucktoy, and that it is a far better strategy than actual design.
spoogemopper - noun - The engineer that must engage in the act of spoogemopping. It is customary to buy this person beer, or else have high turnover in your software team.

Anyways, this matlab thing and other silly function names have spawned some awesome reddit threads:

Chock full of stupid sex variable name humor.

So yeah, that’s it. I may actually post something on topic this week, but for now, just enjoy the silly.

MMO announcement and Database article via IGDA Sex in Games Mailing List, Matlab funny via mathfail.com