5 Gaming Technologies That Are Making Virtual Sex a Reality

5 Getting Warmed Up With Kinect

We've all been there in the real world. It's the beginning of the night, you're feeling confident and you decide you're going to bed with someone even a sober person would call "hot." You'll not settle for less! At 6:15, you lower your goals to "cute, or at least no major deformities." Around last call, you're pretty sure you may have just dry humped an alley cat. At 3 a.m., it's again just you and Internet porn.

This is where technology comes in.

The first thing porn doesn't offer you is context, the thrill of meeting the girl and realizing she's into some casual, nasty sex. That's where the technology behind the XBox Kinect could work its magic.

Don't get me wrong, the high-tech wank potential of the Kinect was apparent about five seconds into the first demonstration of the device. Sex game developers have created crude "use your Kinect to grab the rendered titty" games ...

... but that's really missing the point, which is the many aspects of a fantasy the Kinect can bring to life.

After all, the device can not only make you look like a flailing imbecile by translating your movements into a video game, but can recognize you by both your face and your voice. So already it has the horsepower to put your dream girl on screen, make her look you in the eye (by tracking your head movements), respond to voice commands and call you by name (or rather, the name you told her, i.e., Rodd Thrashcock). The hardware is right there, all it takes to get the ball rolling is a programmer and an adviser to explain to him what sex is. There is no reason in the world your Xbox girl can't respond to your request to "get on all fours" or "now be Boba Fett."

Of course, it can only see the position of your body. It's not like the virtual girl can somehow detect how horny you are. But the Mindflex can.

It's a simple toy meant for kids, available at any department store, in which the player levitates a foam ball on a movable fan and attempts to navigate it through an obstacle course -- controlled entirely by their mind. The input device is a small headset that measures your brainwaves. It can't read your mind, it just measures how much activity is going on, and how much you're concentrating on the task. So the technology exists, off the shelf, to give us a virtual girl who knows how worked up you're getting.

From there it doesn't seem like it would take too much time in a room full of developers, under the pressuring eyes of a million horny gamers, to take this from "make the fan blow harder" to "make the virtual girl get over here and lick my situation."

We're just getting warmed up here.

4 Simulating Human Interaction With Facial Expression Software and 3D

Some of you are already asking, "Yeah, but what about the uncanny valley?" You know, the frozen-faced, dead-eyed, boner-killing look we get from in-game characters due to the technology's inability to render facial expressions correctly. The only way they'd make a virtual girl who looks like a real one is if they claim it's supposed to be Cher.

If you're asking that, you missed the news about the jaw-dropping facial expression technology Rockstar Games has created for the upcoming L.A. Noir.

It's something that both gamers and developers didn't actually think was possible in the foreseeable future, but holy shit, if it isn't finally happening right now. So our virtual, mind-reading girl (who looks you in the eye, knows your name and how aroused you are) can also return human-like facial expressions. A genuine smile, a devilish grin, a convincing look of surprise at how unexpectedly huge your junk is. This is getting creepily close to giving us a girl the sex part of our brain will mistake for real.

Oh, hey, don't forget we can make her 3D, too. And if 3D glasses are too annoying for you to maintain an erection, you won't have to wait long. The "3D image without glasses" thing will start with Nintendo's new portable 3DS but full sized glasses-free displays are being developed by multiple companies. How it works is "we don't fucking care."

So now we're up to a 3D girl, flirting with us and sending nonverbal signals that millions of years of evolution have taught our bodies to respond to with cock juices. Depending on who you're slinging your sex at, that could be either the sexiest or the creepiest thing we can imagine.

Yeah, but you still can't touch her, right? So far this is all just enhancing our boring old porn to make it a little more lifelike. When do you get a virtual boob you can actually grab?

Keep reading ...

3 Touch and Texture Via Cutting Edge Force Feedback

A company called Novint developed a device that not only provides three-dimensional control, but also allows you to feel the texture of objects within the game.

Any shaped handle can be attached to one end, and it is in turn attached to three motorized arms that update their movement or resistance 1,000 times a second. What that means for you is that it can perfectly simulate textures under your hand. Grab a rock in the game, and you feel something hard and heavy in your hand. Grab some Jello and it feels like Jello.

Grab a toned thigh and it will feel like a thigh.

If you're disappointed that it only gets your hands involved in the boob grabbing, ForceTek XIO has come out with a ridiculous looking force feedback system that covers you from bicep to palm. Now, when you slap that ass, your arm stops where it should. When you flip your partner over, you can feel their actual weight. And when you bury the body, you can experience the real resistance of the shovel as it tears through dirt.

Of course, we still have some other senses to incorporate ...

2 Taste and Smell

Ladies, we know how much you love a good cologne like Brut or Old Spice. And sex just isn't sex for guys unless we're tasting a full workday worth of dance-induced sweat and smoke on our chick from a night of bar-hopping. And while Biopac claims they designed their smell-dispensing system for use in military training, we're thinking there's a more lucrative market out there.

It's a device that contains some basic pre-packaged smells that can be thought of like primary colors. When those are mixed a certain way (regular PC software tells it how to mix them), they produce more complex aromas -- over one hundred of them, just to start. And to avoid making the joke about it possibly being used to produce the smell of sex just to fit in with the theme of this article ... they already beat us to it by actually doing it. It comes standard with the machine.

But it could also give you everything from her perfume, to the smoke at the nightclub, to the scented candles on her nightstand. The whole experience.

And now, it's time to get the tongue involved.

The University of Tsukuba (yes, Japan) has invented a machine that not only produces flavors, but also simulates texture and the feeling of chewing. It turns out that the chewing sensation isn't so much associated with the teeth and tongue as it is with the vibrations sent through the jawbone. That means it can simulate every squishy part of a body that you wish to have in your mouth.

And as disturbing as it is to type, it even ejaculates flavors onto your tongue.

1 Boning Your Virtual Partner

"So all that together gets me pretty damn close to actual sex, but doesn't that still just boil down to a means of enhancing my masturbation? Where's the sex in that?" Right here.

That's the RealTouch, a robotic vagina designed by a former NASA engineer. It's already designed to sync up with porn videos, linking the sensation to what's happening onscreen. Though frankly there are tons of these devices, full of electric motors and massagers meant to simulate everything from oral to donkey.

Though we would like to know whatever happened to the Sex Suit. It was a prototype neoprene suit with sensors spread out across the parts that matter, creating heat, cold, vibrations, whatever.

Here's the scary part (besides the suit making you look like Freddie Mercury): Vivid Entertainment had to shelf the project ten years ago because the FCC was afraid it would give people heart attacks or crash their pacemakers. Now, we don't know about you, but the thought of a sex suit that is so powerful, it could fucking kill you ... we have to try that. Even if we were totally against the idea of boning our computers (we're not), we have to admit that there's one hell of a set of bragging rights to be had in riding the Vivid orgasm train and walking away unscathed.

And with that ... we've arrived. We've done it. We have the technology right now to convincingly simulate the one-night-stand experience, from the moment of eye contact across a crowded room through orgasm, relayed via sight, sound, smell, taste and touch.

Yes, I realize all of these technologies are made by different companies and that nobody has written software to make them work in conjunction. But if mankind can't cooperate to make this happen, then why do we have technology at all?

Somebody out there, reading this, has the know-how to make it happen. I'll make you a deal: Build my sex simulator and in exchange, I won't stand in the way of you becoming the richest man on planet Earth.

There's plenty more sex in our new book. And check out more from John, in 5 Ways Television Went Crazy Since I Quit Watching in 2003.