Touching Over The Internet? Uh-Oh…

29 Oct, 2002 by John Hawkins

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Touching Over The Internet? Uh-Oh…: You can now ‘touch’ over the internet…

“…The cube felt rubbery, although it didn’t strictly exist. As I moved the pencil-like mouse in my hand, a cursor moved too in the virtual room where the cube sat. A little manoeuvring and the cursor was beneath the cube. Move the pencil (called a “phantom”) upwards, and suddenly there was the sensation of weight, and the cube moved upwards on the screen. With a little practice, I could flip it upwards and catch it. The surface seemed to give, like rubber; the weight felt like a small ball, perhaps a golf ball.

A few minutes later another cursor appeared, and moved to the opposite side of the cube. Then we both pushed at the same time, and the cube rose. It was the first transmission of “touch” over the internet, demonstrated simultaneously in London and Massachusetts yesterday.”

This is a bit lewd but do you know what my first thought after reading this was? “We’ll have bots giving BJs on the net in five years using this technology.” The technology editor at the Independent must have been thinking the same thing because he made three references to using this technology for internet sex in the article…

“…Developed by Joel Jordan, a PhD student at University College London, with MIT in Boston, the software used could one day mean that we will feel the sensation of objects picked up on the surface of the Moon or beneath the sea, surgeons could do operations remotely, a whole new genre of computer games could be created – internet arm-wrestling, anyone? – and perhaps a remarkable new spice could be added to internet sex.”

“…Promising? To Mr Jordan, 27, it certainly seems so. But to some, the demonstration may just sound like an extension of the most-hyped technologies of the early 1990s: virtual reality, or VR, which became fixed in the public imagination by films such asThe Lawnmower Man in 1992, in which a couple had sex in an artificially created virtual reality world.”

“…”Teledildonics” has long been a holy grail of the sex industry, but the costs have been too great and the technology too complex. But once something becomes widespread, the sex industry will find a way to make it pay – and possibly even speed its adoption.”

Sex and spam drive the internet my friends. Every hot new technology is either designed with sex or spam in mind or is eventually adopted by spammers or internet sex merchants. This technology isn’t going to be any different.