On the path to planning panels for South by Southwest next March, I came across a link for ETech 2008, an O’Reilly conference held earlier this year in California. One panel discussion, Really Really Really Intimate Interfaces, caught my eye because on the conference homepage it linked to the panel’s placeholder with the term “sex hacking.” A query for a “hacking” and “sex” combo on Google turns up only the faint whispers of a long-past forum post from HOPE 2006.
There’s life hacking and even school hacking, but can we hack sex? Or, at least follow LifeHacker’s motto and “get things done” with technology when it comes to romping in (or out of) the bedroom.
Explanations aside, today I came across this nifty little item from OhMiBod:
They call it the NaughtiNano — essentially it’s a vibrator powered by your DRM iPod. According to the website, it “vibrates to the rhythm and intensity of the music.” Now good for them if they got the piece of equipment to shake its tail if you turn up the volume. But let’s try to conceptualize: what if the unit pulsated according to a song’s bass, or wavelength oscillation, or any other obscure yet relevant musical factor. It’s already possible for a music UI to produce a visualization of music. But what if an orgasm looked like this…
or this…
(borrowed from TheAlieness GiselaGiardino²³‘s Flickr)
Or, a deeper question: can a genre excite us? Can sexual desire derive from accordion-dominant, Louisiana zydeco between 150 and 170 BPM? Would seventeenth century Gregorian chant serve up a stronger pleasurable climax?
OhMiBod also sells a product, monikered as Boditalk, a vibrator that reacts to your cell phone calls, buzzing for the duration of your wireless chat. I’m sure that someone could engineer an idea to combine the iPhone’s GPS and some odd sort of social network with this amusing gizmo.
Weird. I can’t believe they make those.
At first when I had scanned this a little too fast, I thought you bought one. HAHA.
There’s a LOT of technological sex hacking going on, and it’s been happening for a while–try googling “Teledildonics.” I went to an exhibit about it at the MoSex, though, and was unimpressed for the same reason why OhMiBod didn’t really catch my eye. I mean, it’s COOL, but it’s more sex-script-kiddieing than hacking because it continues to rely on the basic vibrating motion that has been shown to be not all that effective in causing orgasms. Basically, OhMiBod is still designed with a male eye towards female pleasure, which hardly tickles my loins.
More exciting to me: hacking intimacy, or figuring out other ways to stimulate physical pleasure that are more expansive than pleasure vibrate mode.