Remote estim has been around for decades actually, it's just all developed in very small, private (and sometimes extremely hostile, yes I'm looking at you Smartstim) communities so the info doesn't really get out much.
Many thanks to whoever sent that complement, as well as dang for pointing it out to me. It's been a pleasure to be in this thread, lots of interesting questions and honestly unexpected (but certainly welcome!) positivity.
Patent expired in August 2018, but not before the owner was kind of a dick with it for decades (allowing a licensing cabal to dictate what was done around the industry), then died in 2015, after which a patent troll got ahold of the patent, and sued 8 companies out of business.
Taken at pure sensory value, yup, you're completely correct. These are an extremely lossy compression of physical intimacy. It's like watching a 4k movie compressed to like 4 pixels of monochrome color.
However, you really have to look at the surrounding situation and mental state of the user to get why any of this matters. When you've got enough endorphins flowing, the slightly augmentation to sensory input can have a multiplicative effect. Since the brain regulates whatever your reality is, it's our job to fuck with that (in good ways) more than it is to make some completely mechanically/physically correct 1:1 recreation of sex with another person.
Let's say you're stuck with audio/video chat for intimate relations. But you've added some touch via teledildonics! Sure, it's crappy touch, but someone you want actually touching you but for some reason can't can now at least control that touch!
The media loves to spin sex tech as "this will replace sex in the future" a la Demolition Man or whatever, but that is both the wrong goal and complete bullshit. The fun part of all of this for me is building machines and interfaces to do what people and their genitals can't, and providing technology to build those interfaces/machines to see what other people come up with when freed from the tyranny (allow me my melodrama here) of human form.
This also allows us to build new forms of intimacy, possibly very, very silly forms. As an example: I work with cam models a lot, trying to build interfaces that aren't quite as a objectifying as the usual cam room. One time, I worked with a model and her fan club to hook up Rocket League (yes, the cars in hats playing soccer rocket league) to a sex toy, so any time the controller vibrated, her sex toy vibrated. There's video of how this works (and the software I used to do it and the github repo) here:
Now, this probably sounds like some weird as hell sex. Cam model is on camera, nude, using a toy, playing 3 v 3 rocket league with up to 5 cam room customers. However, this means that the normal rules of rocket league get bent. Players were no longer interested in goals, but rather, in how to cause the model's controller (and therefore toy) to vibrate. This might mean crashing into cars (Hi JG Ballard fans!), trying to get goals when the model was close to a goal to make big explosions, etc... It ended up in all of these continuously shifting team/social structures as people would join/leave, figure out new things, etc... Everyone ended up playing for hours, everyone had a really good time, and it was interactive for both the model and the customers.
So, basically, you've gotta look at these as new forms of sex, not replacements for what we've got. They may not even be good forms of sex, but hey, if everyone's consenting, no one gets hurts, and even maybe it turns out to be a buggy horrible mess, it's fun to try, right?
For reliability, if you just want a vibrator of some form factor to work with, go with something by Lovense (except for the Max, which is kinda shit). Easy to get, just works most of the time, decent ecosystem. https://lovense.com
If you just want the absolute god damn cheapest but still computer controllable wand, the Youou Wand for $16 (I buy these in bulk to give out at workshops): https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07F6XWF2F/
For strokers, Kiiroo Launch (aka Fleshlight Launch but branding is changing currently). Not the best thing on earth, but it does the job right now and there's currently an open source firmware rewrite happening (because there's some masochist out there that loves reading PIC24 assembly. Yes it's fucking PIC24 based.)
If you've got a 3d printer, the (currently mostly penile stimulation focused) OSR2+: https://patreon.com/tempestvr. Something like $2-8 for plans, 3D printable in about 2 days on a stock printer, multi-axis movement, vibrate development community and a ton of add-ons happening.
There's also really interesting DIY stuff happening on the vibrator/small controls side at:
For me, it also stems from Buttplug being my playground to find some of this stuff out. This started as a way for me to work on research ideas both about sex tech, and about building and maintaining projects in a long term manner. For planning specificly, I went from "I can do it outside of bugs" to "Nope let's just use bugs" to "Nope that was a bad idea too let's go back to the original idea but store it next to the code". We'll see where that puts me.
Of course, now that this is trending HN, everyone gets to learn with me too. :D
> I just hope we spare some time to consider what other uses could come from what we enable.
Not to make you feel like you overreacted at all, because this is a fantastic reply and I desperately wish I saw more awesome thinking like this around tech and ethics, but I read the OP as a shitpost, and was replying in kind.
The only reason I can give stark commentary like that is because I've done a lot of ethics work on this field (first hire at my startup with an ethicist who helped craft our project mission statement and philosophies), and yeah, it could get REALLY, REALLY bad in terms of labor, privacy, and many other contexts.
If you'd like my full perspective on how/why I build this stuff, I gave a lecture at CMU last year that goes over a lot of it:
Specifically on the affective state in technical development, I do think biometrics is interesting there, but absolutely not in a way that could be harnessed like I was joking about above (even though it would be because who are we even kidding these days). I did some work on this stuff around 8-9 years ago, a project I called the "Quantified Coder" (I was involved in the whole QuantifiedSelf thing for a while):
Please note that this talk happened before the current ML craze of "your face can tell us if you're a bad human" shit. It sounds FAR different now than I did then. There's neuroscience researching doing really great work on affective state of developers these days (like Chris Parnin, who came up here a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23046429) that I think will be legit helpful.
Anyways, my reply was just riffing evilly on those ideas as a joke.
Apologies though, forgot I was in an setting where that reply DEFINITELY might not have come off as (extremely stark) humor.
Ah, yeah, that's a better metaphor than what I gave there.
I'm also a bit divorced from the customer perspective in this situation because I've been working on the industry side for so long, so I have different expectations and views.
That said, as an implementer of technology of this type, my point was that I feel like live verification gets EXTREMELY INVASIVE in this context. Once you start bringing biometrics and really, hard numbers in general into the voyeurism of camming, it turns into this weird fractal of objectification that I haven't really had time to really unwrap in my head yet, which I'd kinda wanna do before even touching implementations of the tech itself.
There's lots of interest in support for many languages. It's more that the codebase is 99% one developer (me), and there was a ton of fragmentation early on that I'm still working to clean up, that both makes it hard to implement new systems as well as hard for others to contribute. We're getting there.
I'm hoping to stop cranking out code and actually write the developers guide soon, which I think will help immensely.
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