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

Durex Fundawear - Almost There

2013-04-23T22:23:12-07:00

tl;dr

No, I haven’t been living under a rock. Yes, I’ve heard about Durex Fundawear.

I really have very little snide and belittling to say about it. I think they actually did a pretty fucking good job. If the dude that lead the design team had not decided to go the “we’re the first EVAR” route, this would be a completely positive article. But we can’t have everything we want.

Durex Fundawhat?

If you haven’t heard about the Durex Fundawear, watch these two things first so I don’t have to be all SPOILERS and shit.

Oh my sweet fucking jesus at the time of this writing there’s 3.6 MILLION views of that video. This is what happens when a company that knows their brand decides to use it.

The “How they did it” video:

Basically, arduino with some sort of network shield, and cell phone vibrators. Hey, interaction design students, remember when this was your junior year project? Remember how many views your project video got? KNEEL TO YOUR ESTABLISHED BRAND GODS.

Don’t worry, though. Someday you too can grow a sexy scruffy beard and a plaid shirt and be a tech lead at a fancy design firm and call yourself the first in the world to do something that was first talked about almost 40 years ago and has been on the market since the 90’s and that I’ve blogged and taught workshops on for years and helped make a dedicated arduino shield for and is now a common IXD student project. I WON’T BE BITTER.

NOT AT FUCKING ALL.

No. Really. See Also:

“Underwear and touch and remote presence is something that’s never been done”

“This is a project about transferring touch across mass distances, and that’s a first, globally.”

Ben Moir, dude that doesn’t do his fucking research

So, a few quick references for ya.

199FUCKING3 - Stahl Stenslie’s Cyber SM
1999 - The Vivid Cyber Sex Suit
2007 - Jennifer Chowdhury’s Intimate Controllers Project
Also: Every single teledildonics product ever made, from the Audioh and Televibe to the RealTouch and Highjoy and…

Grr. No one ever let this man get robotics based surgery with haptic controls. Because it obviously doesn’t exist.

Ok. I feel better. I’ll stop now.

The Facts

According to someone on twitter who knows these things, Fundawear is simply an experiment. Only 10 sets of them exist. Durex is contemplating commercialization.

Even so, this is getting a LOT of press. Last I checked there were 10’s of articles on major sites about this, and 3.6 million hits over 3 days isn’t too shabby for a sex tech project.

The Good Parts

Ok, with that out of the way, let’s get on to why I like Fundawear.

It’s accessible. It isn’t insertible, it’s just wearable. One of the major freakout factors of sex toys is that you have to put something in them or put them in you. Then you have to hook it to a piece of hardware that you may not even trust to make phone calls or print pages, much less manipulate your bits. With Fundawear, well, you have to put yourself in it, yes. But that’s not quite the same.

Expanding on the lack of bits manipulation, Fundawear seems more like a foreplay toy than an in the act toy. It’s a way to caress someone’s erogenous zones over distances, versus poke/stroke them. This means less to go wrong because you aren’t promising orgasm, you’re just promising tickling. That’s a far easier promise to fulfill than the “GONNA MAKE YA CUM” of most sex toys.

While I rant and rail about how it’s got all of the creativity of a student project, it’s also as easy to grasp as a student project. A lot of the work I do around teledildonics isn’t really graspable by those that aren’t familiar with the tech world. Fundawear keeps it simple enough to let people go “Oh. I touch this thing and I move that. Awesome.”

There are lot of problems of current teledildonics that Fundawear either skirts or just plain solves.

Obtaining: Durex has access to a LOT of storefronts that usual teledildonics devices do not. They could easily ship this to stores that will stock it next to their condoms, winning the impulse-buy market flat-out compared to online buy-and-wait.
Interface: Since you’re caressing areas, not manipulating nono zones, you can be a lot more playful. It’s just fun, not a means to an end.
Usage Interruption: One of the big problems with teledildonics is that it’s usually attached to data streams like video conferencing. There’s a LOT that can go wrong with this, especially if you’re in the middle of doing… things. Since Fundawear is just foreplay, having disconnection issues isn’t quite as jarring.
Cleaning: Just throw it in the wash! Not so easy with dildos or tubes or whatever.

The Iffy Parts

Outside of my own ranting above, there’s really not a lot that’s outright wrong with this project. It’s an experiment, and I think it works well as that. It’ll hopefully get people thinking more about remote sex via technology, in ways that are accessible to those that won’t just stick whatever in whatever ‘cause there’s some circuits in it (STOP JUDGING ME).

Returning to my above point about the simplicity of Fundawear, I also wonder if that might be its downfall as a product. It seems like the initial experience is pretty powerful. But if commercialized, what would reuse be like? I have no stats about how things like Highjoy or Sinulate were used/reused by consumers, so I’m not sure what kind of precedents we have thus far.

Turning Fundawear into a product seems difficult. It’s presented as undergarments that have the vibrators embedded. Actually making undergarments that will fit a majority of people is no small task. This is one place where sex toys excel. We can assume they’ll either be pokey or poked in, and that people have pokey or pokey-inny (or both!) bits for them to be used on, probably of a certain size. The larger the surface area of the body you have to cover with your product, the more complicated things become. They could easily make this a clip-on system so it would work with whatever you might already have (and hugely increase their market share as people add it to fetish garments instead of just underwear), which could solve this problem.

Conclusion

It’s kinda awesome to see big brands venturing into wearable intimate interfaces in a way I don’t hate. We’ve gotta get a market around this stuff one way or another if it’s ever to be viable, and I’ve seen a lot of false starts and stupidity. While not wholly original, Fundawear seems like a good beginning toward mainstream realization of sex tech.

Lovepalz shipping... with a whimper, not a bang

2013-04-22T21:52:12-07:00

I’ve been dodging writing about all of the crazy new toys that’ve been announced lately. I’m sick of spending words pontificating on things that might never come out. I’ve seen too many toys get lots of attention and never ship, and I don’t feel like joining the media circus that is the current “LOOK, TECHNOLOGY YOU CAN STICK IN/STICK IT IN” press release copypastafest. I figure I’ll wait for things to either be released or be interesting, and join in that fanfare.

Lovepalz now apparently fulfills the released part. I have yet to hear of anyone actually getting their hands on one. There’s been no pictures posted of the finished product. No word of the software that’ll be used to run it. But according to a text only post their website, your Zeus or Hera will now be on its way to you as soon as you confirm your shipping info. They didn’t even update their Facebook page. Huh.

Anyways, I can technically post about them now without breaking my own rules. Though it’s pretty much a complete guess as to what’s going on.

WINZZ, the company behind the Lovepalz, does not fill me with hope. They started with a media campaign about being kicked off Kickstarter. That’s fine, it’s how the PR game is played, even though we can’t confirm whether kickstarter actually did that. However, they used that to harvest information versus actually trying their own crowdfunding (not that crowdfunding sex projects is easy), not actually taking orders for the product until months later, and then not actually shipping the product until April 20. This seems kinda sketchy to me.

I know pretty much fuck all about this thing. I can tell you the chips in it (because they posted them), the dimensions of the hardware (because they posted them), some of the basic usage principles (From watching the videos they posted)… But I have no idea if it works as sex hardware, or how interaction will work, or pretty much anything that would make me throw $189 plus $30 shipping at it. I’ve never really seen anyone ride on their PR alone in sex hardware like this. Usually some sex blogger gets one and does the talking for them.

Weird part that keeps me thinking at the moment? It’s wifi. I think it’s actually the first self-connecting toy. Everything else has been either wired, bluetooth, or radio. I mean, wifi is great. It’s wireless, you don’t have to worry about bluetooth stacks or dongles, even if configuration can suck sometimes. The paranoid side of my brain thinks that also means that they could easily tie it to their own service, effectively pulling what RealTouch did before they went open source, only allowing the device to work via some sort of permissions process. The screens in the image above are apparently from LovePalz website, which means all device configuration and interaction either takes place on a locally running webserver (in which case they haven’t solved platform agnosticism via browser as interface?) or on their site (which means flash or else they are bleeding some motherfucking edge on the HTML5 ‘cause WebRTC has landed mainline anywhere yet? Ok sorry I’ll stop web nerding)? The configuration process is unknown, and there are no screens on the device itself. So you somehow have to at least set it up on your wifi, but how? I realize these are things that no one worries about because you’re supposed to fuck it, but, well, if I didn’t worry about these things, there wouldn’t be a slashdong.

It’s not that I don’t think sex toy manufacturers can’t make a good product. I just don’t trust them to, especially not an unproven company’s first product.

Maybe they’ll prove me wrong. That would be awesome.

Physics Glorious Physics

2013-04-16T21:24:11-07:00

Why mine bitcoins when you can virtually drop stacks of floppy dildos and render the result?

And why just render them matte when you could obviously make them shiny?

Via twitter

PS Actual content coming soon. I’ve actually been working on a project for the past 5 months that’s nearing completion, and should be good for about a bazillion posts on here once it’s finished.

Heatwatch II

2012-12-10T23:01:11-08:00

HeatWatch II. Fuck writeups. Diagram says it all.

I love living in the future.

UPDATE: OMFG OMG OMG OMG it gets more awesome:

"These transmitters continuously monitor all mounting activity of your cattle and transmit the mounting data (cow I.D., date of mount, time of day of the mount & duration of the mount) to your computer where advanced software algorithms examine the mounting profile of each animal."

WHY AM I NOT WRITING ADVANCED SOFTWARE ALGORITHMS FOR MOUNTING PROFILES AT THIS VERY SECOND. WHY.

Via cowstories twitter

qDot on Sex With Timaree Podcast

2012-12-03T20:57:21-08:00

In my unending quest to talk a whole bunch about sex toys, I’m on the Sex with Dr. Timaree Podcast this week talking about, well, sex toys.

That's Dr. Timaree. That's not me. Just in case you were confused.

It’s a fun 40 minute conversation about the current landscape of toys, the DIY movement, design considerations, etc etc etc… Give it a listen!

Would You Like Some Making Fuck? - Crowdfunding Sex Projects

2012-11-28T20:01:21-08:00

Let’s say you just created a vibrator hack that’s taken over the internet and now tons of people are begging you to put in on the market and are saying “OMFG LET ME THROW MONEY AT YOU IN A NON-STRIPPERISH WAY” (unless they’re the commenters, at which point just remove the non-).

Kickstarter is a maybe but most likely no, in that you can post things that discuss the topic of sex (plays, documentaries, etc…), but actual sex hardware ain’t happening.

Apparently the play this image is from is not using it as the poster. I'm sad.

Kickstarter’s prohibited devices list includes “Pornographic material”, “Medical and safety-related products”, “Offensive material”, and “Baby products”, all which are valid classifications for sex hardware/projects.

As the enterprising capitalist perv that you are, what are your choices to let that fool born every minute give you their hard earned cash for genital aimed vaporware? Well, there’s:

Passionate Produce
Offbeatr
Lying via CSS and just using the idea as a marketing tactic

This article will cover each of these approaches, as well as their strengths and weaknesses.

Passionate Produce

Passionate Produce is a everything-positive (seriously, look at the footer. EVERYTHING.) sex project crowdfunding site by robotics PhD turned dildo making robotics PhD Kristen Stubbs. This is a site that’s actually yet to be. They’re currently looking for beta projects to post on the site. Yes, the crowdfunding site is still crowdsourcing. It happens.

That said, as seen above, Kristen’s already shown she can actually complete projects, so this is a project borne from first-hand experience that I’m hoping to see good things out of soon.

Offbeatr

Offbeatr has already enjoyed the first-to-market media spoogefest, with their August 2012 launch getting metric shittons of press. The difference with Offbeatr versus Passionate Produce is that Offbeatr has a section for physical products, but concentrates mostly on indie porn projects.

Apparently the play this image is from is not using it as the poster. I'm sad.

Their campaign structure is multi-stage, and requires fees along the way. You submit a project proposal to their site, then it is voted on by users. Once it gets enough votes, it is then reviewed by the offbeatr staff. Then you pay a fee, and the project is rehosted on the site to actually start bringing in cash. The fee, according to their FAQ, is due to the nature of running an adult business, dealing with chargebacks, etc… If your campaign succeeds, they hand you back your fee, but take 20-30% of your campaign funds.

So far the only successful projects the site lists are all furry. Really. I just don’t even.

This setup seems like it makes things difficult on anyone interested in getting projects going, as you now can’t really have an “impulse funding” option. You have to market to users in order to vote the project up, then get those same users to come back and fund. Not only that, the maximum you can set to raise on the site is $30000, which is nowhere near enough to do any sort of appreciable hardware development.

But, who knows. A Furry Video Game managed to make $40k US on there, which is an impressive amount. I don’t think we’ll see any major hardware advances coming via Offbeatr due to funding restrictions and weird campaign setup, but there might be some fun small runs or one-offs.

Making Shit Up That Looks Like Crowdfunding

Those who can’t join, lie like the dickens via CSS. A fucking mastermind move of marketing in 2012.

Ya see that up there? That’s LovePalz website as of the day of this posting. Back in early October, LovePalz came out of nowhere to announce a new set of teledildonics toys based on new air pump technology. Now, don’t worry, I have my usual hyperbolic screed prepared on this whole project, but that’s neither here nor there for this article, because how they marketed it was INSANE.

They said Kickstarter rejected them at the top of the page, and that’s why they’re self hosting.

That’s it.

Of course, this is the Kickstarter that’s been posting record after record of crazy crowdfunded projects this year. The Kickstarter that the media are pissing themselves stupid over because it’s the “TRUE FULFILLMENT OF THE CONSUMER” or something like that. The media lost. their. shit.

Now, Kickstarter, having at least a modicum of media savvy, didn’t say shit about this. I emailed them. I’m sure many media outlets emailed them. If Kickstarter said they did reject them, press for LovePalz. If Kickstarter says it didn’t reject them, press for LovePalz. Kickstarter says nothing, press for LovePalz. Fucking fantastic work by the LovePalz marketing team. (BoingBoing actually somewhat called them out on this.)

Not only that, their “order” button wasn’t actually an order button. It just signs you up for a mailing list for whenever the product might be ready. So they inflate their “orders” number on the front page, a number we have zero sources of truth on. Along with the press raving about the fact that you can have sex over the internet (this happens at least once a year), they can easily play this into a very nice “peer comfortableness” system where people think “Wow look at that number so many people signed up so it’s gotta be OK and cool and sex is good with it right? Right!”

‘course, we don’t know if it’s gonna be a product, but they harvested a fantastic amount of emails, I’m sure.

Absolutely. Fucking. Fabulous.

But, not to be left out, 1 month later…

It’s Vibease! And god bless ‘um, they’re doin’ the exact same thing. This is a kickstarter-lovepalz-alike page to sell their vibrator, which is supposed to ship in February 2013.

Now we at least know that Vibease can execute, since they actually have a live app, and their CEO would show up at a startup competition at a Chuck-E-Cheeze if you held one there. They got hustle, if nothing else. (Note: To be fair, I would go to a startup competition at a Chuck-E-Cheeze.

But, same idea applies as above. Make number on front page, make people comfortable, harvest emails. Certainly ain’t crowdfunding, though.

There you have it. There are ways to source cash from wacky cloud dwellers for internet butt plugs right now, but they’re either in their pre-infancy, expensive and dodgy, or lies. It sounds bad, but I can think of many successful, viable industries where the start sounded pretty much like that sentence. There’s money to be gotten via angels and VCs too, but that’s an article for another day. In a world where it’s still difficult to buy already made adult products due to chargebacks, international law, and other fun issues we don’t cover here, there’s a tough road ahead for these services. But if history has proven anything, it’s that we like sex and will throw resources at it however we can, so it’s probably just a matter of time.

Lelo Lyla RF/Arduino Control Hack, and a Hopeful Future

2012-11-26T20:44:21-08:00

Lelo Lyla RF/Arduino Control Hack

One of the best things that I think can happen to someone who blogs about a horribly over-specific subject is to have a story be so interesting and well-written that they get so caught up in interacting and watching explode that they completely forget to actually write about the damn thing on their own site until 3 days later. I find myself in that situation now, and couldn’t be happier about it.

3 days ago, scanlime wrote one of the best, clearest, most accessible reverse engineering posts I’ve ever read, and it just so happened to be about sex toys. She took a Lelo Leya vibrator, which uses a common RF chip to talk to an accelerometer enabled controller, reversed the RF protocol, and made a new hardware control solution using sonar rangefinders that better fit her interface needs.

Then the internet blew up.

The list goes on for quite a while.

There’s… honestly not much to be said on here. I’m not gonna summarize the article any more than I have. For fuck sake, go read it (and watch the video above). I can only hope to put out content of this quality in future Slashdong posts. Everything is outlined understandably, and the project accomplished a well-set goal in a straight-forward way.

More than that, I hope we start seeing more content like this, period. It’s sometimes been lonely running Slashdong and I love seeing more stuff like this. Most of what the media has covered lately has been “did you know you can fuck with a computer?” or “look what the weird fetish people do!” shit. Not getting the media they should are the many new businesses/projects/blogs like Doctor Xtreme and his Orgasmatron X1 or the Toymaker Project and their Hammer Sensor/LED Dildo. All of whom I need to get around to covering here, but even if I don’t, the fact that they exist and that the DIY sex tech world is becoming a slightly more populated place is pretty fucking awesome. I’ve watched the cycle of sex tech oscillate for almost 8 years now, and this is the most momentum I can remember the DIY side building. There’s certainly exciting things in the commercial realms, especially with some new startups happening, but in the end, I’m personally more interested in small, one-off, well executed solutions than large commercial successes.

So, here’s to a hopeful upswing in the cycle that doesn’t end so quick this time. Or maybe doesn’t end at all.

Now, back to the eye bleeding task of mining comment threads for what what tidbits of decent content I can among sexist anti-fucking shitbags. It’s a tough job, but… no, no one should really have to do it.

Masturbation Challenge Interfaces - Fap Gauntlet and Cock Hero

2012-11-19T20:36:21-08:00

In doing some research for an upcoming project, I’ve been looking through different internet related interfaces for stimulation display during masturbation. Or, in non-faux-academic parlance: jackin’ games. I figured I might as well write up my notes on the interfaces and ideas behind Fap Gauntlets and Cock Hero.

No. Not that kind of gauntlet.

Both of these “games” focus on masturbating for as long as possible, using different properties (speed, pressure, etc…). The differences come in how they’re built, and the interfaces they use to set the properties of the game.

Fap Gauntlets

A fap gauntlet is simply an image thread where with each image posted by a forum member, masturbation metrics are provided for that post. These types of threads seem to pop up on chan forums of various shapes and sizes, though they seem to be popular on hentai and furry related boards.

The metrics dictated usually consist of:

Time to spend masturbating to picture
Pressure to use
Strokes per second

The fchan furry porn board has a couple of fap gauntlet threads live at the moment. However, note that these threads die over time, and will most likely not be live in weeks/months after this post is made, but are valid as of 2012-11-19:

Assuming neither of those is live, here's what you missed

While googling around for more info on this, I found that someone had actually written an automatic fap gauntlet generator. This is a python program that automatically indexes images off 4chan threads, then uses wxwidgets to display pictures from them, with random timings, pressures, and stroke speeds.

Ever wonder what images you get when you just google "porn"?

While it can’t be seen in the picture above, the stroke speed is set by the color of the font fading from green to black and back to green at different speeds per picture, to set a visual cue. FapGauntlet also allows you to choose a local directory of images (which is good because as of this writing the regex for the forum scraper is broken). Once you’re all done, it’ll also give you a printout of your stats, that looks something like this:

extremely light:
	images:	1
	strokes:	0
	time:	0


medium:
	images:	2
	strokes:	2
	time:	0.0163331031799


hard:
	images:	1
	strokes:	0
	time:	0


extremely hard:
	images:	1
	strokes:	2
	time:	12.3221650124


tight:
	images:	1
	strokes:	0
	time:	0


very hard:
	images:	2
	strokes:	0
	time:	0


loose:
	images:	1
	strokes:	4
	time:	6.36375236511


Total:
	images:	9
	strokes:	8
	time:	18.7022504807

This gives you a breakdown of stroke pressures, types, and timing over a certain number of images. It is basically quantified self for fapping. Neat!

As the program is currently being hosted via zip archives on mediafire, I decided to take the python code and put it on github. It’s now at

http://github.com/qdot/fap-gauntlet

Whether I’ll actually update it is another question completely, but this at least makes sure the code won’t disappear off the net.

Cock Hero

Let’s move on to masturbation DDR, aka “Cock Hero”.

Cock Hero takes the ideas of Fap Gauntlets, replacing still images and text instructions with videos and music.

Cock Hero 15 brought to you by PornHub
Cock Hero 15 brought to you by PornHub

These videos are usually upwards of an hour long, containing multiple scenes. The text instructions are now inherent in the properties of the video, as the length is simply the length of the scene, and the speed actually becomes dynamic, since it is set to the changing BPM of a song.

Ai ee ay ee ay I'm your little butterfly Green, black and blue Make the colors in the sky

Visual cues scroll along the bottom of the screen, for those that have absolutely no sense of time (if someone makes one of these videos to some properly weird math rock with ridiculous time signatures, I’ll love you forever)…

As an added “bonus”, some authors of cock hero videos will insert messages along the bottom of the screen to warn or inspire the player to greater speeds/pressures or upcoming breaks, or else just to be dorky.

Messages displayed at the bottom of some cock hero vids

There’s a few key differences in these interfaces that make them both viable. I see Cock Hero as a more cohesive experience; sense is integrated with command, since the temporal and speed elements are just properties of the video and sound. However, the compilation aspect is handled by a single creator (though could certainly be automated much in the same way FapGauntlet works), so you’re currently stuck with whatever they like. For Fap Gauntlets, well, there’s forms of porn that simply don’t have enough animated content to work as a Cock Hero medium. There’s certainly enough hentai out there to fill a few Cock Hero rounds, but furry porn might get one, maybe two, and would require encoding from flash animations mostly, making it a horribly time consuming process. Since fap gauntlets are based on a message board thread, the community aspect could be seen as crowdsourced masturbation directions, which in and of itself could be a new/emerging fetish.

Both fap gauntlets and cock hero could be implemented via hardware means, simply taking the movement and time commands (as well as pressure if the toy actually has capabilities for that) and mapping them to a toy. This could work for either vibrators or things like the RealTouch or Virtual Hole.

The interfaces for masturbation challenges, while keeping their vocabulary male focused, seem genderless at their core. Everyone exists in time, speed and pressure are valid metrics for multiple different kinds of genetalia. There’s some interesting questions as to whether the interface actually appeals to a certain type/gender, but I’ll leave that for the gender theory and games bloggers.

Cock Hero and Fap Gauntlets interfaces provide specific communities with new ways to interact with porn based on available content. Be it still media or motion, they both have their place in the masturbation challenge landscape. I wouldn’t be surprised to see these interfaces continue to evolve into new and more immersive experiences, or be co-opted by toy makers in the future.

(PS: I will also pay good money for an impressionist painting of the masturbation challenge landscape.)

The Pen15 Board Now At Trinculo's Attic

2012-09-03T12:41:11-07:00

The Pen15 Board now at Trinculo’s Attic

Just a quick update. As of, oh, about 8 months ago, the shop location for the Pen15 Board changed. It is now on sale at Trinculo’s Attic. Same price at it was before, plus you can load up your cart with all of your theatrical electronics needs while you’re at it!

RealTouch Removes DRM, Goes Open Source

2012-05-29T09:21:22-07:00

Last Tuesday, an amazing thing happened. A thing that will forever change how we deal with each other and the world around us. Something we thought only governments could do, that’s now in the hands of everyone.

Last Tuesday, RealTouch released version 2.0 of their Platform Agent Software, along with a firmware update for the hardware. Usually sex toy software updates aren’t really cause for mass celebration, but this is a big deal.

Why? Because there’s no longer security on the system. The RealTouch is now an open sex toy development system on any operating system you can access the hardware from. With the release of my librealtouch software, that’s pretty much all of them.

Now, for those of you that don’t remember, the RealTouch is a sex toy (mainly for men, but after our last post, I’m sure there are enterprising women out there that might find some use for it) that synchronizes with movies you play on your computer. This means that if someone/something is moving back and forth in the movie, the belts on the toy will move in the same direction/speed. There’s also a heater and lube injection mechanism, making it one of the more advanced toys on the market.

Before this latest release, it cost a good bit of cash to buy the video streams for your toy, and they could only be streamed off the web, so you were stuck being connected to the net, or not having much fun with the RealTouch hardware. That’s now no longer the case.

This move brings up a lot of questions. Why open source now? How open source is it? How will they continue to make money? What does this mean for developers? I’ll try to cover most of these, as the company behind RealTouch was kind enough to fill me in on the details.

RealTouch Before Last Tuesday

First off, an analysis of where we were with RealTouch before last Tuesday. In order to use the RealTouch hardware at all, a user was required to be connected to the internet. The RealTouch software would contact the manufacturer’s website on each use, making sure the user had an account that was paid up.

The RealTouch hardware cost about $0.99-$1.99US per minute to use, and could only be used with video streamed from RealTouch’s movies page. About 1.5 years after the RealTouch hardware came out, the manufacturer released a Content Development Kit that allowed others to encode videos for the RealTouch hardware, but this never really took off due to the fact that the usage was still handled by the RealTouch company, so just because a developer made new content didn’t mean they could easily distribute it to users.

RealTouch Security

Skip this section if you’re not interested in nerdery. But then, why are you even reading this blog?

The specifics of the security protocol backing this were actually fairly simple, though surprisingly effective. On starting up the RealTouch “Platform Agent” software, the agent would query the toy for its unique serial number, and one 16-bit pseudo-random value. These would be sent to the website, which would send back a key generated off of these 3 values. This key had to be sent to the USB control box for the RealTouch before it would do anything. The USB protocol was not actually encrypted, and once the key was sent to the box, it would operate normally

There were a couple of ways someone could’ve cracked this. The firmware could’ve been dumped from the chip, though the chip is epoxy-dotted on the board so stripping down to the cap would’ve been prohibitive. Not only that, it would’ve been much easier to simply reverse engineer the pinout of the RealTouch connector and build a new controller box. There’s only 2 motors, a servo, a pump, and a heating element in the device itself, so this most likely could’ve been done with an Arduino and a motor shield. There were a few places online that listed pinouts, but as far as I’m aware, no one ever manufactured boxes.

Anyways, none of that is really needed now.

RealTouch Opens Up - Why?

Obviously this business model meant that they’d at least make some cash. If anyone ever wanted to use their toy, they’d have to pay up for it. Of course, if the company ever went bust, there’d be hell to pay since no one would ever be able to use the hardware they’d purchased.

Also, the RealTouch company was apparently finding out that developers weren’t all that interested in a platform they could make content for but not control. That works for places big enough to have popular app stores like Apple, but for a small sex toy manufacturer, it doesn’t scale at all.

The new business strategy appears to be centered around the new RealTouch Interactive Toy, which we wrote about here earlier this year. The RealTouch Interactive is a sensor enabled (capacative touch sensor) dildo that allows models to interact in real time with Real Touch hardware users.

The interactive toy will only be distributed to models, and all content must be hosted and streamed through the main RealTouch content distribution website. Therefore, they still own the revenue stream generated by the toy. That makes static content a little less interesting to try to keep hold of. Not to mention, they’re hopefully at a point now where the $329 for the toy is turning a profit.

Back on the RealTouch user hardware side of things…

By removing the online security for the RealTouch hardware, the company can get into the DVD business without having to worry about the player being connected to the net. They also hope new developers will pop up and add features to the toy, like access to the Second Life Virtual World.

RealTouch Protocol Overview and librealtouch

While there’s no longer security on the system, RealTouch doesn’t have much of an interest in providing low level, direct USB interaction with the toy. Unlike the Microsoft Kinect situation, which required drivers written for all platforms to start the project, the company behind RealTouch have already done enough work to make sure there’s not much of a need to create new low level software.

The genius is that RealTouch Platform Agent is just a small network server that listens on a port on localhost. It takes ASCII commands and turns them into control messages for the toy. Therefore, any program that can talk to a network port can now control the RealTouch hardware. There’s not really any reason for them to put the QA time into releasing for non-mainstream platforms, or the developer support into low level USB access.

So, why am I doing this? Because it’s what I do. Not to mention, I highly doubt we’ll ever see RealTouch software for Linux, Free/Net/OpenBSD, Haiku, or any other non-mainstream OS. Implementing the low level protocol means we can bring the toy up on whatever platform we might need. RealTouch doesn’t really care either way that it’s being done, as it only helps their revenue model.

I’ve spent the past week playing with the new firmware, and figuring out the protocol. The CDK commands map almost exactly to the low level USB protocol, so anything the low level access can do, the CDK can do. This includes:

Heater Control
Lube Control
Period Movement of Top Belt/Bottom Belt/Opening with envelopes/magnitude
Vector Movement of Top Belt/Bottom Belt/Opening with envelopes/magnitude

For more information on the CDK, check out the CDK Documentation

The protocol itself is laid out in a proof of concept format in python at https://github.com/qdot/librealtouch/blob/master/python/realtouch.py

I’m working on a cross-platform HIDAPI based version of the direct USB access library, as well as the usual PureData/MaxMSP/Processing bindings to the network layer for artists. I figure librealtouch will most likely just stay C for low level access, and most other language bindings (because god knows Ruby people would love to wrap their language around their genitals) will just be network access, which keeps things easily cross platform.

Where We Go From Here

So, now the $329US price tag for the RealTouch hardware gets you an open development platform as well as a sex toy. That’s neat. It’ll be interesting to see if anyone takes advantage of this. One of the best resources for development is the RealTouch Forums, where multiple people are already developing their own encoding software.

I’ll be writing future articles on how movies can be encoded for the RealTouch and other synchronization toys, both manually and algorithmically.

I’ll also probably be doing some pretty stupid shit with the RealTouch. So stay tuned!