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OTAKU MAnKO: Dental Robot Feels Your Pain

Dental Robot Feels Your Pain

It’s no secret that sex dolls have been getting increasingly realistic. Whether you’re intrigued, creeped out by products like the Realdoll — or both or neither — it’s pretty obvious that we’re moving toward the day when a perv with enough money can score him- or herself a fully-functional sexbot that fulfils one’s every fantasy and says “Yes, Ma’am” (or “No, Sir, I couldn’t possibly!” or “I don’t think so, slave, now grovel on your knees!”) doing it. As static and essentially non-interactive as something like the Realdoll is, progress is certainly being made.

Sadly, that progress — and I hope you’ll forgive the bad pun once you see where I’m going with this — is painfully slow. In the U.S., there’s a lot of talk and not a lot of development — let me tell you, I’m not saving up yet to order my fantasy sexbot from Amazon.com. But the Japanese, as a favorite blog of mine has often said, have handed our asses to us in the Transpacific we’ve-got-a-sexbot competition.

National Geographic (auto-start video alert) covered the Simroid (”Simulator Humanoid”), exhibited at Japan’s largest robotics convention in late November. I don’t think I’m going out on a limb here in saying that some readers — particularly the dental fetishists — may get a dirty thought or when viewing the NG video of this product, which is a robot designed to provide training for dental students. With sensors in its teeth, the Simroid allows dentists in training to drill and get a real, physical response when they hit a nerve. In development is the feature that allows the student to inject the Simroid’s gums with anesthetic.

It will be lost on few of you, probably, that this is a full-bodied robot and offers full-bodied reactions — not to put too fine a point on it, she jerks and squirms when you jab her. She also happens to be kind of hot in that very special way only androids can be . . . why is it, do you think that the experimental Simroid was made in the form of a hot sexy chick? Don’t answer that: Much more interesting is the fact that while one of the exhibitors stands there looking hot in a plain white lab coat and tie, Simroid is strapped into her chair just over his left shoulder, mouth wide open as if held by a spider gag — as if to say “Hello, Doctor!”

The developers of the Simroid aren’t quoting a price that I can find, but my guess is that no Simroids will be sprawled under your Christmas tree unless your name is Warren Buffet or Bill Gates (and — again guessing — probably not even then). But I see an important point here — for every brand of robot that wants to interact intimately with humans, sensory input is going to be the critical factor.

As one of the dozens if not hundreds of attendees who had the sublime pleasure of fingering the Moaning Lisa at the recent Arse Electronica conference, I have a small amount of insight into the problems of making it with a sexbot. Moaning Lisa is an interactive art project created by Matt Ganucheau. Some of her parts (her vulva and the sweet spot of her ass) are covered in metal receptors that cause her to admit vocal responses when they’re fondled or lightly smacked. Her nipples, to put it politely, are purely analog — they’re knobs.

I don’t mean to be ungentlemanly, or to tell locker-room tales about my exploits with a voluble manniquen, but doing the Moaning Lisa was far from a sexually gratifying experience. Fingering the poor ‘bot brought only the occasional unconvincing lowing sound at what felt like random intervals, and spanking her got me pretty much nowhere. What’s worse, the knobs Lisa had for nipples reminded me too vividly of something my first girlfriend said before we ever had sex: “If you grab my nipples and twist them like radio knobs, I will kick you in the balls.”

You might say that my first girlfriend knew how to give direction, but Lisa really, really didn’t. My willingness after 20 years to disregard my old girlfriend’s well-considered advice and twist Lisa’s knobs ferociously got me very little satisfaction — Lisa stared blankly and, about two minutes later, kind of went “Aaaaaooooo-ooohhhhhhhh.”

Sounding not unlike a warbling guinea pig, Lisa did not entice me to further sexbot experiments, and would not have done so even if we’d been able to get, you know, some time alone.

But between Moaning Lisa and Simroid, I think the human race might be on to something. Improve the sensitivity of Lisa’s tin-plated neural receptors, and we’d be talkin’. Then — I’m an aesthete — replace the features on that mannequin face and her exceedingly bad hair with a Bettie Page, perhaps an Iberian nose, about a dozen facial piercings and while we’re at it a curled-lip sneer. Allow her to vocalize, saying things like “I’m so stressed out from working on my paper ‘Toward Retrograde Psychoanalysis of Marxist Deconstruction,’” “I ultimately prefer .357 magnum rounds to .40 caliber” and “Is that a socket wrench in your overalls or are you just happy to see me?”

Then, lowing sounds or no, as far as I’m concerned we’d be building the perfect sexbot.

Thomas Roche is the managing editor of Eros Zine, teaches at San Francisco Sex Information, and also blogs on sex, drugs and cryptozoology at thomasroche.com.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, 11 December 2007 at 12:00 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.