The Blowfish Blog

OTAKU MAnKO: Virtual Sex: Input or Output?

A company called OCZ Technology has taken a big step forward toward virtual sex — maybe. As reported by online tech blog Slashdot, they’re readying their “neural impulse actuator” for shipping next week. What’s a neural impulse actuator? A device that goes on your noggin, headband style, and transmits your thoughts to your computer — via USB, believe it or not. Devices like this are intended to replace the mouse, or ultimately the keyboard, with devices that read your thoughts. All you gotta do is think “a little to the left,” and that’s where your mouse goes. The device is selling for either $600 or $300, depending on who you listen to, so obviously it could make quite a splash in the gaming market and elsewhere.

One of the early Slashdot commenters on this story, going by the handle “corpuscavernosa,” observed that “The online porn experience would be greatly simplified” — ba-dum-cha! Mssr/Mme. Cavernosa may intend to be cheeky, but this one’s a gimme. More than a few friends I know have already mused how a neural impulse actuator could change the playing field when it comes to the online jerkoff. OCZ is marketing this as an input device for gaming, but I guess the gaming-perv-sex-nerd underground has already decided there are built-in sexual uses for any computer input device that leaves both your hands free.

Yeah, maybe. The problem is that ultimately while a look-left-look-right, nod, cock-your-head model of the computer-user interface would make everything a bit simpler and more instinctive, when applied to online porn, it’s not ultimately any different than an index-finger-click, thumb-rollerball-left, scroll-wheel model of user interface. Just browsing online porn with neural-actuator-enabled instant gratification, no fingers required — except the ones crammed into interesting places — would not be a concretely different experience than just, say, having an extra hand or two. How many hands do most people need to get off?

What really revolutionized porn was the rapid deployment of custom-ordered images and video to your computer screen. The delivery method, not the control interface, is what makes human-computer erotic interactions really interesting. And that’s where this device gets me all worked up. If information can travel from brain to computer, won’t it someday — and probably soon — be able to travel from computer to brain, directly? We’re talking Brainstorm or Strangedays-style shared experience. The really revolutionary output device is going to be one that provides not just a direct neural interface for visual and auditory cues, but tactile experience.

There have been a number of variously successful and unsuccessful attempts to integrate tactile or physical interactivity with the computer browsing experience — user-interface nerds call this “haptic technology.” In the gaming world, such things include wholesome effects like force feedback, which I first experienced back in the early ’90s with the shuddering weapons of the Terminator 2 arcade game. But ultimately, what I’m hoping for is to be able to have a computer provide an all-body tactile experience, and the way that’s going to happen is if information can go from computer to brain without having to stop in my body.

We’re hopefully going to see a lot more interactivity from online sex over the next few years, almost certainly driven by development in the online gaming world. But personally, I don’t really care how the information gets out of my brain — I’m more interested in how information, and therefore experience, can get into it.

Thomas Roche is the Public Relations Manager at Kink.com, an instructor at San Francisco Sex Information, and blogs about sex, drugs, and cryptozoology at www.thomasroche.com.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, 4 March 2008 at 12:00 pm 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.