Who Wants to Hack Some Robot-Assisted Virtual Sex

Below, bear witness to the animated blueprint for one ever-increasingly feasible future of sex; robotics-assissted teledildonics. The video, touting a new advancement (and a call for investment) from a sex tech company called FriXion, also makes a fine primer on the range of technologies soon to be available in the realm of hands-free networked pleasure.

According to its website, FriXion is "an online community whose users are able to touch each other using various supported haptic devices from hand holding and kissing up to full penetrative sex—regardless of where they are in the world, from across a room to across an ocean."

The "real-time bidirectional force feedback telemetry" you see in the video "can be configured for any gender or orientation," and it does exactly what you'd think it does—it translates the sexual activity from one wired sex toy across the digital sea to another, emulating the movements and reactions of each. Combined with Skype and a webcam, it's inching us towards fully experiential, yet completely disembodied sex.

The tech looks poised to go beyond transmitting traditional sex, too: you can apparently use a mouse or a smartphone to manipulate pleasure centers in ways that simply weren't previously available to the old-fashioned human. Furthermore, the video notes that it's an open platform API, so developers can design their own apps and plug-ins to further expand and enweirden the horizons of netsex. We're right on the cusp, maybe, of mainstreamed sex-hacking.

Combine all that with new interfaces like Google Glass, or even VR, and who knows what sexual technologies we're about to unleash.

This is the sort of thing the cyberpunks have dreamed about for ages. Teledildonics, after all, is nothing new. The field has been developing for well over a decade; the biggest barriers haven't been technology, but cultural acceptance. It's easy to simply sneer at this kind of thing, or giggle, or be repulsed by its alienness—or to at least feign revulsion.

But thanks, perhaps, to the rise of webcam porn stars and the incessant creep of bodily techno-integration, the notion of teledildonics seems increasingly mundane. And opening up the API to designers may prove a savvy move; no doubt there are already closeted DIY sex hackers who'd welcome an opportunity to openly monetize some of their ideas. As the concept is mainstreamed—and it may take years yet—at least enough to be accepted by the massive digital porn industry, there will no doubt be plenty of opportunities to cash in on novel apps and sex software.

Given the amount of time we're giving ourselves over to screens and virtual spaces—and yes, it's more and more every year, still—technology like this may yet prove central to the future of sex.