It was only a matter of time before someone harnessed the power of immersive virtual reality and focussed it into getting our rocks off: sex toy company Tenga looks to have created the first sex simulator using the Oculus Rift and a series of questionable aids.
Editor’s note: Before you all complain in the comments, these videos are Not Safe For Work. That probably goes for the links too. You were warned.
As creepy as this first video looks, it’s actually a fairly genius contraption. It’s essentially a futuristic male sex toy in three parts.
First, there’s the Oculus Rift. That goes over the eyes of the wearer and provides visual stimulation in the form of a manga character performing virtual sex acts on your avatar. To create an immersive sexual experience, however, you need more than just visual stimuli.
That’s where Tenga’s masturbation sleeve comes in. It provides feedback to your gentleman vegetables, but it doesn’t respond to the output coming from the actual sex simulator.
To add immersion, the devs hooked the Tenga sleeve up to a Novint Falcon 3D feedback peripheral, which takes the actions of the character and reflects them on the sleeve.
The Novint Falcon is intended to be hooked up to something like a pistol peripheral and used in action and first-person shooter titles to give gamers the real feeling of shooting a gun or being shot themselves. The theory is the same here, but the application is radically different.
In the second video, however, things get a little darker. The Novint and the Tenga are used as an input device by the “player”, and a scenario plays out where the virtual character is having sex with you. I don’t know why, but that crosses a line for me. The words ‘rape simulator’ come to mind when I see the second video.
Being jerked off by a virtual robot is weird, but if that’s how someone gets their rocks off then cool. Simulating a forced sex act isn’t on, and developers should seriously think hard about building said scenarios.
Some of you will watch this and want one, and some of you will watch it and be unsettled. Others just won’t watch it at all. Whatever the outcome, this was only a matter of time.