Stuff You Should Know - What's the future of virtual sex?

Episode Date: February 2, 2017

In the not too distant future, sex may not involve being in the same room as your partner. In fact, your partner may not even have to be a human. We're talking virtual sex here. Couple VR with high tech, smart sex toys and intercourse as we know it may be a thing of the past. Except not really. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant.

Jerry's over there. Sex! Sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex. I was gonna say we should do a COA, but maybe that qualifies. I think so too. Parents, this is gonna be a show that you made. I want your kids to listen to, we'll just go ahead and say that.

Yeah, it's about some adult business. That's right. Yeah, freaky stuff. Goodness, how are you? I'm doing good. I still have a little bit of the nose juice. For the most part, I'm good. My energy's up.

Dude, I have to show you. Next time I blow my nose, I have to show you what this looks like. Oh, no, no, no, no. It's like Cheetos colored in intensity. I've never seen anything like it before, and it's coming out of my head. That's weird. Orange? Orangey yellow.

Day glow. Well, I might as well talk about my sickness. Yeah, how are you feeling? Well, I had, as you know, and as you also even further know, about once a year I get a stomach flu, even though I think I took last year off. I don't think I ever got it last year. I don't think you did either. But so my daughter waits 18 full months before she throws up for the first time,

which is a nice run. Sure. And she comes in the kitchen the other day. She's like Jerry Seinfeld. He had a really long run too. She comes in the kitchen and just projectile vomits all over the place out of nowhere. Oh, my gosh. And isn't feeling well and has some diarrhea going on.

Well, this show is really getting off to a gross start. Sure. But two days after that, I'm like, I'm invincible. Like, I've avoided this. Oh, that's a bad thing to think. I hope you didn't say it out loud. I think I might have. And then at two days ago at 4 PM, I was like, I feel a little weird.

And five minutes later, I was throwing up. And then six hours after me, it hit Emily. So she was able to at least care for our child until she went to bed. And then she was like, I'm not feeling so good either. And then my mom thankfully came through and took our child from the sick house. And then Emily and I literally all night long, we each had a bathroom at our disposal. And it was just like every 30 minutes, somebody in the house is like, uh.

Gross, man. It was really bad. I mean, it was just it was one of those things where we pulled the curtains and we were just like didn't even want to look at each other. It was just gross. Yeah. But you know, it's a 24 hour thing generally. And yeah, you said you told Jerry that it was like 24 hours to the minute.

Pretty much. I mean, I started feeling better at about four or five yesterday. That's great. But I'm just just weak, you know, man, like it just takes a lot out of you. And I feel like of, you know, I'm not big on the ab workout. But I feel like I know you look ripped. Oh, dude, I might have like, I feel like I've really might have pulled muscles in my rib cage from retching.

That's funny. All right. So no one else is listening anymore. No, let's talk about virtual sex. Yeah, we chased everyone off. This is a good plan. Hats off to you. Yeah.

So Chuck. Yes. People invented the internet and within about, I don't know, eight or nine seconds there was a porn site up, right? Probably, yeah. And since then, apparently it's been largely overstated. But but most people associate the internet at least in part with photography. Really?

Oh, you're kidding. What do you mean, associate? Like? Like, when you think of the internet, you think, well, that's a vast repository of pornography. Right. I don't know if that's the case. I think a lot of people do.

Okay. But there's a lot of pornography on the internet. And in fact, the internet has helped just foster pornography into, you know, by by by light speed. Yes. It's just burgeon, right? But it turns out, apparently, one study I saw in 2011 estimated that only 1.5% of all web pages are sexual sex based.

How many? 1.5%. Oh. Well, I was really surprised to hear that. Yeah. But I mean, that's just a numbers game. Sure. I mean, there's there are literally millions of porn sites.

But doesn't that doesn't that seem low, though, even even considering? Yeah. The point is, people still do like sex and pornography and they like the internet. And when it when the thing when they were put together, everything just blew up. Like apparently now the internet porn industry alone globally is worth something like $40 to $50 billion. Wow. I saw that in a 2015 article in The Economist, that's a ton of cash, man.

It is. That's like, that's how much like the Disney company is worth. They're not going to like that their name is associated with this episode in any way. No. I just pulled that out of the air. Yeah. Good choice. But one of the things, like I said, when when the internet furthered pornography, it hasn't

stopped. It hasn't plateaued. It's like, oh, great. Here's a here's a website that's got porn on it. We've achieved peak internet pornography. Like some of the most innovative thoughts to developing the internet further has been based on pornography. Yeah.

Just when you think they've covered it all, right, somebody's like, hey, you like to take a Christmas ham and carve out a hole and put your foot in it. We got a website for that. Your foot. It's called hamfoot.com. Oh, man, you better hurry up and trademark that before we release this episode. By the way, when you this article was written by Robert Lam, our own colleague here of stuff to blow your mind.

When you read it, did you like how did you feel just hearing it in Robert's voice in my head? I don't know. Maybe that's with it. I just wanted to take a shower. With Robert? No. If he typed the word lovers like one more time, I was literally just I don't have never

liked that word. No, I'm with you. And especially not coming from Robert like him. And I think he used the word lovers in here like six times. Yeah. Like, you know, he was wearing a silk robe when he wrote this. Yeah. I can't imagine how much like graphic stuff got edited out from his first draft.

But we're talking about the future of simulated virtual sex, not necessarily robot sex, because that's a different thing. And we actually we did a whole episode on that, remember? Yeah. I think it was called like will we marry robots because we're trying to be above the board. Right. But we talked a lot about that. But that's not what this episode's about.

You know, this is a little bit more about using technology to either simulate sex or to and I found out in a lot of cases and we'll go through it as we talk about some of these specific things. A lot of them seem geared toward or at least they're marketed as like, hey, are you in a long distance relationship? Like, you know, we can help bring you closer by sort of synchronizing phone sex in a way, like just a super advanced form of phone sex. Right.

Right. And that's definitely like the the genteel way of putting it, because I think probably more to the point, it's, hey, do you like to have internet sex with people you don't know? Well, have we got some technology coming down the pike for you? Yeah. Like, hey, are you super lonely and like, and you know, it's easy to to laugh about like the lonely dude in his house, but there are, you know, they're genuine phobias and

like this could be a benefit to people who, who aren't like literally aren't able to certain conditions to go out and have real sex, you know? Sure. Yeah. It's easy to knock, but it's, it's a real, it could be proved to be a real benefit. Yeah. I'm going to love this stuff that the other thing that that almost sounds like what you just said was like a midterm goal of, of the future of internet based sex, right?

But ultimately from everything I'm seeing, the ultimate goal or maybe not even goal, but what will probably prove to be the ultimate reality is that sex will be so improved and then perfectly refined by science and technology that we, we will end up preferring it and I mean, like the normal average human will end up preferring simulated sex over the actual real thing. Not true. I don't know, man. I mean, that's a, that's, that sounds like one of those things that, that people in 50

years will look back and be like, what idiots, you know, they got that really wrong. But it also seems like, I don't know, people like, people like good sex, you know? Yeah. But it's like simulated sex is to real sex as soilent as to food. Well, that's, that's, so I guess we can talk about it now. There's the basis of it is not like everybody's just going to be these just completely, what's the word I'm looking for? Just this crazy promiscuous people all just having anonymous internet sex with people

all over the internet. Okay. That will, that will probably be a very real possibility. I mean, it already is, but this actual virtual like convincingly simulated sex will eventually be a possibility. What, what I've seen that will be more likely is that people will be in monogamous relationships like they are now, but rather than doing it, you will go with the, you're like your separate rooms and do it remotely using the simulations.

Right. Or it potentially could be a way to maybe relieve the, the inclination to step out on your husband or wife and say, you know what, I'm not going to cheat on you. I'm going to, you know, it's just a very technologically advanced form of masturbation. Sure. Uh, but that also like, I could definitely see couples where say like, you know, that's fine. That's great.

Go get your rocks off with the computer lady, but also see like, no, no, no, that's not like that's terrible. Yeah. And I think that's already an issue now. Like, you know, are you sure with porn sites or porn sites or, or webcam people like whatever. That when you, when you add this element, and this is ultimately what we're talking about Chuck is the, the progression toward adding actual physical sensation to, to internet sex.

Yeah. Um, that this, that just opens up the whole idea of cheating, like even further, you know, yeah, like you wouldn't have to use your imagination any longer because your body is being physically manipulated to, to recreate the, the, um, sensations of having sex in real life. I feel like we should take a break. I think so too. I think we really set this one up so high that we can't possibly deliver from now on.

All right. Well, let's take a break and, uh, I'm going to go have a talk with Robert Lam and we'll be back right after this. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?

So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Which episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s? Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough

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All right. So, uh, Robert Lam points out that every lover's embrace is essentially sense data. That's right. And that's true. Um, you know, it's touch, smell, uh, sound, it's, it's like all the sensory data that we get from, you know, eating an apple or something is, is the same with sex, the sexy times. Right.

But, uh, he asked a very pertinent question here and that's kind of what we're after is how far can you go to digitize and transmit that information and, uh, touch is probably the best, the obvious starting point. Right. Exactly. Because if you step back and you look at the, the landscape of internet sexuality today, right? Yeah.

It's all, all of it is visual. The entire thing. I mean, there's audio too. So it is, um, oral and visual. And I, I, I mean, the AU are AL. Um, no, I had a joke. I had to really fight to not say out loud. Well, uh, email it to me.

All right. Okay. So basically that the current state of internet sex uses your eyes and your ears and that's it. Right. Yeah. And everything that we have is based on that. And there's, but that's, that's not to say that that's not going to play a part in the

future of sex. It's just, that's the bedrock, the basis that's been laid and now they're trying to develop it based on that bedrock. And like you said, the next step is touch. Yeah. And if we're going to talk about technology and touch, um, haptic technology, which we've talked about, we've talked about this before, haven't we? In some capacity, surely maybe it was the trans, uh, cranial, uh, the thinking cap. Was that maybe, I don't know.

It doesn't ring a bell to me. Honestly. All right. Well, anyway, haptic technology is that that's going to have a lot of applications. It's essentially, I mean, if you're talking about, uh, non-sexy time stuff, it ranges from, uh, telosurgery, like literally a doctor being able to perform a surgery that's not in the room, um, which could be amazing, you know, in a lifesaving technology, uh, or like military training, space, uh, NASA, uh, space exploration, stuff like that.

But it's essentially technology that, uh, is, it's wearable. I mean, they talk about gloves a lot, but it, it takes, it can take the form of a shirt that you wear that sends, you know, pulses of stimulation through that device, whether it's a glove or a shirt to your body. Right. Exactly. So it, it recreates the sensation of touch, right? Yeah.

And the, the weird thing is when I started researching this, I was like, you know, what is touch? You take it for granted. But, um, one of the things that they're going for is when you, when you touch something, what you're really doing, like let's say you pick up a vase, you're picking it up, but as far as your sense of touch is concerned, that vase is exerting pressure on the inside of your hand. And haptic gloves in particular are concerned with recreating that pressure, um, against

the inside of your hand to make it feel like when you're looking online and you're virtually grabbing a vase that in real life, the, the pressure that you would normally be feeling is being recreated by a number of different means. And they've got a lot of different, uh, technologies, uh, that are competing right now in the prototype space for coming up with this kind of haptic technology that can recreate it. Like there's one, did you see that thing I sent you about, uh, the haptic glove that uses ultrasound? Yeah, that's out of the University of Sussex in, uh, Jolly Old England.

And it's called skin haptics as the, as a system. And yeah, it uses ultrasound, uh, pulsing this, focusing basically this haptic feedback onto the surface of your skin. So it feels like, I mean, right now it's not just like sexy stuff. They're talking about, uh, like a, like an interface that doesn't exist in front of you. Right. So there, there's a couple of different ones.

One actually uses ultrasound to disturb the air in mid air. So when you go to press a button with your finger, the ultrasound, a non-existent button. Right. Exactly. Yeah. Um, the ultrasound creates an enough air turbulence where your finger's going that you're, you get a bit of resistance from it. You feel pressure, which is awesome.

Yeah. It's amazing. The other skin, uh, I think skin haptics version actually sends the, the ultrasound pulse through your hand so that you feel it from, it's pulsing from the back of your hand through your hand. And then the sensation is, uh, being felt on your palm. So it's recreating it coming in the reverse direction, but it feels like, say you're picking up a base.

Yeah. Now is that with a glove or is that just the ultrasound through the air? That second one is with the glove. Okay. So, so, um, the other one is like, say, uh, a screen that's mounted next to an oven is using ultrasound from the screen on the countertop to disturb the air above it in mid air. That's different. Right.

Like the glove is sending it from the back of your hand to the front of your hand. And I keep saying it's like you're grabbing a base, but it really with what we're talking about, it's, they're trying to recreate what it feels like to say grab a boob. I mean, that's what they're doing here. Right. So, so, you know, the Kinect controller for, I think Microsoft came out with it for Xbox a few years back and, um, like within literally within a month, there was an open source controller. It still is.

And within a month, somebody released a, um, like a Kinect porn game, right? And so if you look at the, the videos of this, did you see any of them, uh, of the Xbox thing or the, that other thing? The Xbox one. No, I did not see that one. So it's basically the demo is a guy like kind of feeling up a CGI lady, right? Okay. And, and if what he's doing is it's all visual.

What they're trying to get is with, with haptic devices is that visual thing, but then you will feel what you're seeing on screen. That's, that's the next step that people are working on as far as internet sex is going. Yeah. Trying to synchronize. Well, we'll, we'll get to that. But yeah, trying to synchronize these things to where you're looking at something and if you, and it just matches up the feel and the, and the visual all matches up.

Right. So you've got the visual to begin with. That's already done that now you have, thanks to the say VR connect, you can move your hand in this world and it translates onto your computer, the virtual world. And then that, so that's done. The next step again is recreating the sensation of touch from that virtual world into this world. Right.

So, what about the, that, that website, the sex game website? Oh, 3DX chat. Did you go to that one? Yes. Holy cow. Yeah. Warning, warning. Very graphic website.

Yeah. I, we're not saying that to all the 14-year-olds because I think every 14-year-old that live has been there. But the older people. Well, this 45-year-old had not. Yeah. I hadn't either. I had no idea it was a thing.

What is that? It kept popping up in, in, in research and I went and looked and I was like, no way. Yeah. It's, that is a sex game and it's, you're, you have an avatar. But game, game is, you're using that loosely. It's almost like second life. It's like a hangout, like virtual chat, like life basically. Yeah.

Like you, you have a, you design your, your dude or your lady and you go into a bar and you're hanging out and then you take that person back to your apartment and you have like really graphic, uh, you know, animated sex. Right. But the person you're picking up is an actual person in real life as well. It's their avatar. Right. It's not like, you know, you're, you're picking up a sim or something.

Right. So, and that, that's apparently like really big right now. Yeah. Yeah. That's surprising. 92 dollars a year. That's what it costs? Yeah.

You get the. That's a weird number. I know, and it's not even 92. I rounded up. It's like 91.99. That's just a hundred bucks. I don't, I don't know. They found that was a tipping point.

Yeah. Exactly. They won't pay 99. They'll pay 91.50. Yeah. We pulled a few perverts in our town and they said a hundred dollars, no way, but they got confused around the 91 mark so that we want that. So Chuck, we, we were largely talking about with haptic devices, um, the glove.

It's not just the glove, that's a, that's a big first step, but ultimately the goal is going to be a, basically a haptic full body suit to wear this, the pressure and sense and warmth and everything that has to do with touch is recreated all over your body. Yes. Because your hands are great, but you know, there's still just your hands as far as internet sex is concerned that, that full body haptic suit is going to be the, the holy grail. And apparently it's not that far off. There's a guy who founded a company called shadow robot company.

That sounds creepy. Well, actually they make anthropomorphic robot hands for, um, like, uh, people who have had a limb amputated. It's like a legit robot, um, company. Oh, well that's, he just happened to be, right. His name was Richard Greenhill and he said that, um, I think it was last year in an article. He said that the haptic full body haptic suits are just a few years away probably. Wow.

Yeah. That'll be huge. But in the meantime, there's been these baby steps that have been taken over the years. And one of the first, I guess kind of prototypes of a haptic suit was a haptic shirt called the hug shirt. Yeah. I don't, I looked, I went to their website and I didn't see, I mean, it said buy it now. So I clicked on it to see how much it was and then it didn't come up.

So I don't know if it's not at market yet, but the idea is, is it's a shirt and this is the, you know, the most G rated part of the show because it's a shirt that simulates a hug. Yeah. Which is pretty sweet. It's a company, a UK company called cute circuit. And I think they came out with it back in like 2001 or two and they, I think they released them for sale in like 2005 or six or something like that.

But basically, you are wearing your, your hug shirt, you're connected to the internet via the hug shirt app. And then your, your, your lover, your lover, man, I was going to say little sweetie was on the other end, but lovers fine. And they're wearing their hug shirt connected to the app. So when you simulate a hug, right, you hug yourself during the hug shirt, it transmits that hug to your lover, right? And they feel the sensation of the hug you just sent transmitted through their hug shirt.

It's pretty, it's awfully sweet. Yeah. I wanted to, I want to know what this feels like, you know, I wanted to sample one. Yeah. Well, I mean, we're on a pretty great streak of not doing the stuff that we're talking about. So why start now, you know, well, I couldn't, you know, I tried to buy one, but I didn't see where you could.

Did you see a very nice man named Don Kent who gave us plenty of the earlier before sent us a box of Soylent. Oh, wonderful. Yeah. Well, let's try it on air. Okay. Okay. Oh man, that's a great idea.

We'll have to set it up in another episode just so that it has all the proper introductions. We'll just say this so that everybody can get really excited about it. Yeah. I'm excited already. Okay. So the simulator that is in prototype mode, there's something called the Kiss Transmitter from Kajimoto Laboratory at Tokyo's University of Electro-Communications and did you see this thing?

Yeah. I was very much turned off by that. Yeah. It's at least right now, unless the prototype is advanced, it's supposed to simulate French kissing, but it was a box and it looked like a bent drinking straw that just went around in a circle. Yeah. And they showed some poor undergrad who was having to demonstrate it and they were doing

close-ups of his mouth and this thing swirling around with it. Yeah. It's not pleasant at all. No. But the Kissinger, well, hold on, just with the Kiss Transmitter, I think the idea is eventually that straw will be a tongue, which would make a lot more sense. But the trick to this is it doesn't just spin in a circle, what it does is it works with you.

Like when you are moving your tongue around, it is reciprocating in likewise fashion. So it's not just willy-nilly spinning around in a circle. I got you. It's smarter than that. Yeah. So there is this other thing called the Kissinger. I did see that. That was really creepy.

So that one, this one makes a lot more sense to me. It's actually the PhD project of Emma Yan Zhang out of the City University of London. And this thing, it was originally a box that connected via USB to your laptop that you kissed and it had kind of almost cartoonish lips attached to it or whatever. And then the newer prototype is this thing that you connect to, say, your iPhone. And so it's connected to the web through an app. And when it's got this, I guess the mouth interface, it's just this pad, almost a touchpad area that you kiss, right?

Yes. And as you're kissing it, it is taking in the movement and pressure of your lips, sending it through the app to your lover on the other end and recreates the kiss to them. But what's cool is it's bi-directional. So while they're kissing you back, you're receiving their kiss. Yeah. What's the disturbing part to me is that it comes in the form of a little round bunny rabbit.

Oh, yeah? Yeah, you didn't see it? Oh, that was the first version. Oh. The second version is much less... They basically threw out any attempt to make it look like a mouth. It functions like it. It doesn't look like it.

Because I think they probably, you were probably in the majority of people were like, I'm not kissing that thing. Well, yeah. I mean, it was a little, it looked like a little round, like Furby toy with a big set of lips on it. Yeah. And the other disturbing part was you had to hold it down because it was constantly trying to get away.

Which it was like, why did you make that design choice? That's very creepy. Yeah. And we'll get to really creepy stuff later too, by the way. Well, are you talking about telediltonics? I think we should take a break before we talk about that. About telediltonics? Yeah.

I think we should take a break. Alright we're back to talk about telediltonics. It's funny, like I can't say lover, but I have no problem saying telediltonics. Yeah. So, of course they called it that. It needs some like 90s club like background beat with like telediltonics. Yeah. Maybe we'll see if Noel whip us up one.

Alright so telediltonics is the development of automated sex toys controlled by either a program or remote user. Right. So technically, if kissing it could be construed as sex, the kissinger is a form of telediltonics. Yes. Right. And the basis of telediltonics is you have some sort of sex toy, I guess is a good way to put it.

That's a great way to put it. And that sex toy is connected to the internet and like you said it can be controlled by somebody else on the other end or a program or like a video that's pre-programmed to interact with your sex toy, right? Both of those are going to be huge. But it seems like the progression is more toward remote sex, right? So the upshot of it is that you have two separate sex toys with some distance between them connected to the internet and the people manipulating them on either side are receiving the sense

information, the tactile information from the other's sex toy into their sex toy and is responding to it in kind. Yeah. How is that? That's good, you navigated those waters well. Thank you. If it sounds like the word itself sounds like something from the 70s, it's because it is. It was coined in 1975 by a guy named Ted Nelson and he was talking about a future where you

have remote sex with those real feelings of touch transmitted through computers. So he was really kind of ahead of the game there. And one thing they compare it to, it's also cyber dildonics or tele-dildonics. One kind of non-sexy thing that they will liken it to is the vibrating video game controller. Oh yeah, like the N64 Rumble pack. Yeah, but I mean they all have it now and if you play video games, that's a big part of it. It adds a lot to the gameplay when you feel like the rumble of a car crash or an explosion

or something. And it's kind of subtle, but it's just such a part of gaming now, if it went away people would be like, you know, what's going on, it's not nearly as good. Right, okay. So now imagine that, like your controller rumbling a little bit. And the effect that that has on you, if you think about it, especially with the N64 Rumble pack, the first one, I believe, was haptic technology, right? Oh yeah, I remember when that came out, it was pretty awesome.

It was awesome, but if you think about it, basically your controller just shook and it didn't necessarily faithfully recreate whatever it was supposed to be recreating, but that extra sense that was being manipulated caused your brain to just go wild. Your imagination just ran wild and it really enhanced it, like you said, right? Yeah, it's gotten a lot better too with how they do it. Now imagine you take that out of your controller and out of your hands and apply it to, say, your sex toy, right? And now you're developing sex toys that have an amazing degree of precision in recreating

temperature, moisture level, pressure, attention, torque, horsepower, all this stuff, right? So the sex toys are advancing and then their ability, their bi-directional ability to receive information and transmit information to another sex toy, which is then capable of recreating and then sending its own information, means that you can have virtual sex across the internet using sex toys and experiencing a real tactile sensation from it. Yeah, and these are the ones where mostly I saw that they were trying to target couples that are in long distance relationships or when you're away from each other for business traveler or whatever, that you can sync up your sex toys in real time.

So the things that you're doing are being felt on the other end. Exactly. A good example of this is the Love Pals, which if you're a sex toy manufacturer, step up the names, shall we? Oh, it's always been that way. Love Pals with a Z. Yeah, of course. But they came up with a pair of sex toys called Zeus and Hera and they're exactly what we're

describing and from what I can gather, they're basically the cutting edge of it. Yeah, I mean, I looked up, they list a few in this article, Real Touch, from 2009 seems like it completely went away. There was one in 2011 called Lovens, not with a Z, surprisingly, and they had the Eye Man and the Eye Lady and I looked that up, they had Max and Nora, which was a male masturbator, which is a machine that does it for you, and a female stimulator and they named them Max and Nora. And they worked through Bluetooth and their phone app, but the last I saw was there was

an Indiegogo from a couple of years ago that was half funded and closed. So the only one that I've seen that has really, and I don't know about taken off because I don't know their sales, but seems like it's a legit thing that's out there is the Love Pals. Well, did you look up the one? So we got that article from the website of a company called Kiru K-I-I-R-O-O and they had their own thing going on. That's actually doing well too, the Onyx.

Yeah, the Onyx and the Pearl. Yes. Yeah. And the Onyx is the male buddy, and the Pearl is the female buddy. Yeah. And these things look like the right out of the Apple Store, I don't know if you saw pictures, but they're obviously trying to make them take them out of the back rooms of Spencer Gifts and bring them to the forefront of like, look at this thing, it looks like you're

like any Apple device you would find, it's futuristic looking, you can put it in your dishwasher. You can leave it on your coffee table and your parents could come over, they'll have no idea. Exactly. It doesn't have any weird spikes or nubs. Right. You don't get like a free trial of simulated pot with it.

What's that stuff called? I have no idea. You know, like simulated, like fake pot that you could buy at a head shop. Oh, yeah, I think I know what you're talking about. I can't remember. It's called Spice. Yes, Spice. You get a little baggy of spice for free with it.

They're like, we simulate everything. All right, so we're joking around a lot, but there's a fan named Dr. Stuart Milloy, and he created something called the Orgasmatron. Orgasmatron. And again, that's kind of a goofy name, but he created it in 2008, and this one actually sends an electrical pulse through the nerves of the spinal cord. And basically, the idea is it could potentially help women who either cannot or lost the ability to experience an orgasm to regain that with this device.

Yeah. Which is pretty amazing. Well, I should say he named it after the machine in Woody Allen Sleeper from 1973, right? But apparently he stumbled upon this idea because he is a pain doctor, but he uses electrodes in the brain to cut down on chronic pain patients, and he was working on one woman, and apparently during the procedure, so he knows where the electrodes should go, the patient has to be conscious. So they just give you a local anesthetic and take off the top of your head, and then he

gets in there and fiddles around. It's like Hellraiser basically, right? And as he was doing it, he hit the spot, and he said that the patient began to, quote, exclaim emphatically, and he stops and was like, what's going on? What are you experiencing? And she's like, you need to teach my husband how to do that. And he's like, huh, people would love this. But I was reading Chuck the New Scientist article on it, and they said that his orgasmatron

received a limp reception from the scientific community. They're better than that. They said limp reception. They're better than that. Apparently not. So we've covered touch. Touch is going to be very important. When pretty soon, there's this thing called the Illusion VR Body Suit, and it's basically

a hacked together version of what will ultimately be what everybody's wearing in the future, which is a full haptic body suit with VR, which is a really important next step as well. Pornography combined with some sort of sex toy that works automatically. A teledildonic. Yes. So the idea, I mean, you've heard of Oculus Rift, the probably the most advanced VR system going now, at least as far as I know. I'm not up to date on the latest with that stuff, but it's supposed to be great.

So you're talking about a future where you, I guess sound is covered with the invention of headphones is kind of all you need there. But throw on the headphones, throw on the Oculus Rift, strap into your teledildonic system. Teledildonic. And you could, you know, the range of things that can happen there are either just long distance sex with your lover, or potentially weird things like, hey, do you want to have sex with Jennifer Lopez?

Well, we've got a program you can pay for and do that. And Jennifer Lopez is really mad. Well, yeah. Or I think another potential that a lot of people are worried about from this is VR especially gets more and more realistic are people just acting out there just darkest fantasies. And there's a lot of debate right now over ethically, morally, and legally how acceptable that is. Absolutely.

And one of the big discussions about internet pornography right now is as we're reaching this ability to pretty accurately simulate, although a lot of it's not very accurate, like even good CGI is still clearly CGI and some of it dips into the uncanny valley. But as we pass out of the uncanny valley and get like more and more realistic, the question is, well, if you have people who are engaged in victimizing other people in real life out of compulsion or something like that, like there's a lot of debate over whether pedophilia is actually based on brain chemistry, which would take it out of the realm of choice, right?

So let's say you believe that pedophiliacs, people, yeah, pedophiliacs, that's right. If you believe that pedophiles don't have a choice in their decisions, their compulsions, and that they have to carry this out, just basically castrate themselves, is it morally acceptable to give these people a virtual simulation of that? Yes. Yeah. In which case it will satisfy their compulsion while at the same time preventing them from carrying out this compulsion in real life.

So in real life, no one is being harmed, but you're still giving over a virtual kid for a pedophile to do whatever with. Yeah. That is the slipperiest of slopes. Yes, it is. Because if someone were to argue that, someone very rightfully would argue that who's saying that's satisfying that and not building up to act out on that for real, you know? Yeah.

And that's a lot of concern coming from the other end as well as that. As we get more and more into this incredibly rendered VR sex that you can actually feel and sense in all that as well, the fact that it's VR will make people who otherwise in real life wouldn't have said, what happens if I choke this avatar to death while we're doing it? Let's see what that's like. And then they'll find out that they actually like that and they might want to try it in real life.

Oh, yeah. I mean, as soon as this stuff is out there, there's going to be someone selling rape and murder fantasy software. And I just don't see how that could lead to anything good. Well, but that's the long-term debate. People have said the same thing about violent video games. There's never been a body of study that shows that violent video games actually do lead to increased violence in real life.

So I mean, is the same thing true for sex? Freaky sex? Well, all right, people can turn it off because Chuck's opinion is coming. Boy, people don't like it. And I say opinionated things. Some people do. I don't remember if I covered this much on our episode about video game violence, but I've played a lot of violent video games more in the last two years.

And my feeling is that you may not be able to pinpoint that as a cause, but I think it can be a factor and a tipping point to someone who is teetering on that edge of carrying out a violent act. That's my, I firmly believe that because I am a nonviolent grown man. And when you play these games enough, you find yourself driving around and having these thoughts like not that I really would do these things, but they pop into your head just like at the same way you said Tetris Dreams. When I played Tetris too much and I would not even dreams like waking dreams, I would

walk into a room and see boxes, be like, oh, you could arrange these in a different way. It like has a way of kind of taking your brain over. And then you take out your aggression on the box. Because I think it definitely absolutely can be a factor and a tipping point if someone is close. Yeah. Again, I mean, it's anecdotal, but you prefaced it with the fact that that's your opinion. Just my opinion.

And that's your experience too, you know. Yeah. And I'm not saying like ban violent video games because like the lion's share of people can play these things with no problem. But I don't know. It's tricky. One of the other problems with it too, Chuck, is that as we get more and more into recreating the sensation of sex through VR, the possibility of sexual assault is expected to just skyrocket.

Virtual sexual assault. Yeah. And apparently it's already happened. Oh, yeah. I saw it. There's a writer named Jordan Belair. And she was playing a VR game called Quiver in multiplayer mode. And she said that her voice sold her out as a woman, or revealed she was a woman.

But other than that, her avatar looked like a man. And then one of the other players just started chasing her and groping her and rubbing her in her, where her bathing suit covers. And she said that she felt genuinely violated by it. I'm sure. This is without any kind of haptic technology whatsoever. This is strictly visual. Yeah.

And she still felt violated. So were she wearing like a haptic body suit so she could feel what her avatar was feeling? What's the difference between somebody doing that in real life and somebody doing it virtually? I think to me, the answer is none. There is no difference for the end user, for the victim is another way to put it. The victim is going to experience it as the same because your brain is relying on sensory input to determine, say, whether a touch is comfortable or welcomed or unwelcomed or violating. And whether it's being recreated by a computer, your mind isn't going to make any distinction

from that. So the violation is through and through real. And again, there's that potential where because it's not in real life and because of the anonymity that the internet affords, that the possibility of that happening can just really explode. Yeah. Somebody needs to come up with a game called, a game like that called affirmative consent. You know, where everything is just above board, you introduce yourself and you get to know each other.

And you say, I'd like to be your lover. Yeah. I'd like to be your lover. Can I touch you there? Sure. No? Okay. Well, I'll just back out of the room slowly.

So the one thing we haven't talked about is smell as far as sensory experience goes. And some people may discount smell or the importance of smell and sexuality, but I have always been long championed smell as one of the underrated senses when it comes to sexy times. And if you do think, oh, like it's not the big of a deal, think about if you've ever had a time where smell has ruined something in sexy time. So if you do like think smell is not that big of a deal, we're not, just don't think of just good smells like, oh, somebody's perfume or cologne. Like think of like bad smells, how that can turn something wrong.

Well, Robert actually makes a pretty good point in this article. He says that one out of every 50 genes lover in the human genome concern sense or smell, the sense of smell. Yeah, I think every husband has been told at some point, like, why don't you go take a shower first, you know, like you were just working in the yard. Sure. There's nothing sexy about that. Yeah.

Except the smell of grass is pretty great. Well, grass. Sure. But there was a company Chuck a few years back, I think they went under around 2001 or 2002. And the company is called DigiSense. And they had something called the eye smell. And it was connected to your computer. And the whole idea was that they had to say, you know, how you have cyan, magenta, yellow

and black. Is that right? CMYK. Yeah. And you can make millions and millions of colors based from those four pigments. These guys were trying to do the same thing with smells, come up with four basic scents that you could make virtually any smell with, right? And it's amazing.

It's so sad to me that they didn't go anywhere. But it's like, come back DigiSense. Do it now. Like, we're ready. Yeah. This would be so amazing if like the whole thing was you'd be on the Internet and there'd be a little pixel on the web page that triggered your eye smell to produce a certain scent. It sent the information, how long it should be there for, how intense, whatever.

So you're looking at elephant pictures and you can smell the elephant poop right there in the room with you. CMYK. Yeah. There's this other cool aspect Robert points out too, which is the addition of this smell and taste to this experience and touch even, it lightens the burden on the visuals. So it's something called cross modal attention effects in science communities. And it basically, it's the way the brain prioritizes sensory inputs.

Like, you know, if you're sitting on those, and this is a great example uses, if you're sitting on the sofa and you're just sitting there, you might feel the sense of the sofa cushion under your arm and under your butt. But then someone comes over and kisses you and your brain goes, well, hey, and you don't feel the sofa cushion under your butt anymore. You feel the lips against your lover's lips. Yeah, and your bow tie spins around, but that's a real thing. It's cross modal attention effects.

It's like literally the brain prioritizing sensory input. Yeah. And apparently also one of the aspects of it too is that when you have the more senses you have, giving you information about a particular thing, the less any one particular sense has to carry the load. And again, up to this point, our sense of vision and our sense of hearing have been doing all of the heavy lifting. So if you add smell, if you manage to add taste, if you manage to add touch, the like

just how visually stunning the VR pornography has to be, it comes down several notches. It doesn't have to be as good because these other senses are making up the slack. Well, I mean, phone sex was just audio. Right. I mean, I said was, I imagine that's still a thing. But did you ever see Shortcuts, the Robert Altman movie? Mm-hmm. Remember Jennifer Jason Lee was a phone sex operator?

Oh, yeah. She's like, you know, feeding her baby and ironing and like her husband's in the other, Chris Penn is in the other room. God rest his soul. Oh, Chris Penn died, huh? Yeah. Don't even tell. 2016?

Oh, no, no, no, no. Years ago. Poor Chris Penn. Yeah. But anyway, that was always kind of thought that was funny. Like anyone who thinks the phone sex person is enjoying themselves like you are, they've really sold themselves. Yeah.

And Robert, I do want to read this one great sentence from his article here. There are people at the University of York's audio laboratory who are working to employ this cross-modal attention effects and really just fine-tune it all. And he said here in his last sentence, they've even considered employing a mouthpiece to simulate different textures against the tongue and mouth for virtual food chewing, they claim. Man. I think Robert navigated some pretty tricky waters himself. No, he did well.

It's a good article. I just, yeah. Yeah. The lovers thing. Yeah. You got anything else? No, sir. Well, I want to give a shout out to Tracy Clark Flory from Vocative for the ethics of

VR sex stuff, Kee-Roo who gave us the Teladil-Donic stuff, and of course, our own Robert Layam who wrote the whole article, right? Yeah. Stuff to blow your mind. Good show. If you want to know more about future sex, you can type those words into the search bar and what comes up will be wow-wee-wow-wow. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail.

I'm doing something I don't normally do because I didn't have one prepared. I'm just going to randomly pull one up. We have to do administrative details again soon. Yeah, we do. I've gotten some good stuff. By the way, thank you to the people that sent in emails saying that an English speaker saying junta is completely correct. I know you like to show off your flair, your Latin American flair.

My heat. My Latin heat. All right, I found one. Hey, guys, for starters, I love the show. I got hooked on S-U-S-K. People still do that occasionally. That's funny. Sure.

Susque. And even had iTunes to do the download all, and I'm turning through them all. This guy done listening to the Soylent episode, and the listener mail you mentioned how the breastfeeding episode was so well received. So was there an episode in stuff you should know history? He said S-U-S-K the second time, by the way, that was chock full of hate mail would be a cool factoid of what your greatest bomb was. Maybe parallel that with your top five shows of all time to smooth it over.

Well, I'm not going to do that. Yeah, seriously. But it's a lot of asks. Yeah, that is from John Navikas, and boy, you know what, we got a lot of bad mail recently about artificial sweeteners, I've noticed. Oh, yeah, people are kind of mad. Some people are. I think they're all like from the Splenda family, but yeah, that one set people off

to an extent. We also got a lot of kudos for that one. The one, John, to me that stands out, that we got the most hate mail for is not necessarily our biggest bomb, but it was homelessness, a homelessness episode, sure. We got tons and tons and tons of negative emails from people who were basically like, homeless people are there because they're lazy, stop telling people to be nice to them. And probably more than any other episode we've ever done, I would say that's the one that has, that we got the most hate mail for.

What about you? Yeah, probably so, yeah, I think so. I think objectively that is the one by far that we got the most hate mail for. Yeah, and we've been on record about that, and we even got a mail just last week about that episode saying, hey, I know you guys get a lot of flak for this one, and they sent us an email of support, which is nice. Thank you to whoever wrote that, that was very nice. Yeah, so I'm going to say artificial sweeteners and homelessness.

Yeah. Yeah, it's not like those emails like made me reconsider my stance on how I feel about homeless people or whatever, but it just sucks to hear angry stuff from that many people about something that you think is kind of brain dead. Yeah. Yeah. Well, all right. If you want to get in touch with us like John did, thanks for the email, John.

You can tweet to us. I'm at JoshumClark and at SYSKpodcast, Chuck's at Charles W. Chuck Bryant and at Stuff You Should Know on Facebook. You can send us an email to StuffPodcast.HowStuffWorks.com and as always, hang out with us at our home on the web, StuffYouShouldKnow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. On the podcast, HeyDude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and

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