Artists Brought Us There First

• CyberSM
  
  
  
  Stahl Stenslie and Kirk Woolford's "CyberSM"
  Stahl Stenslie and Kirk Woolford, two German artists, created (probably) the first interactive sex suit, based on sado-masochistic role-playing, in three versions. Woolford describes the project on his Web site:

  We based CyberSM on Sado-Masochistic role playing, after all, V.R. equipment has always looked similar to S&M fetish fashion. The first motion tracking suit was a full-bodied black leather suit covered with shiny chrome plates. Through the CyberSM system, participants built a virtual body linked to their own body. They then handed this virtual body, and to a degree, control of their physical body to the other participant while gaining control of the other participant's body. The CyberSM system included two suits worn by the participants, a database of 3-D scans used to build the virtual bodies and 2 computers connected with international ISDN telephone lines. Once the participants put on one of the suits, they built a virtual body by picking from the database. When ready, the computers exchanged these proxies, and each participant received the other participant's body on the screen in front of them. By rotating and zooming the virtual body, participants could place pointer over regions of the virtual body. When the participant clicked a button, the computer transmitted this "touch" over the ISDN lines to the owner of the virtual body. The remote computer translated this "touch" into a physical impulse (vibration or electric shock) generated by the remote participant's suit. In order to give a greater sense of the other person's presence, we included a voice connection between the sites, allowing participants to speak to each other. We quickly learned that transmitting a single touch, even one so strong as an electric shock, was no match for the com'munications abilities of a telephone. The system functioned amazingly well as long as both participants spoke the same language. However, during the first exhibition of CyberSM, we had a participant in Paris who spoke only French, and a participant in Cologne who spoke German and English. After they pushed a couple buttons, and mumbled to each other, they got bored and asked somebody to take the "silly suits" off them. I then realized that we had created method of illustrating a telephone conversation with touch. The project allowed people to "touch" each other over a network, but the form of the touch was too limited to allow them to carry on a dialogue. They fell back upon the skills they learned through years of talking on telephones. In order to create a more fulfilling touch over a network, Stahl and I began work on CyberSM III. Aside from many technical changes, CyberSM III changed the interface from a pointer and model of the body, to the physical body as an interface itself. In CyberSM III, the participants touched their own bodies in order to touch the other participant. The suits built for CyberSM III included various touch zones. When the participant touched one of these zones, their computer measured how long the zone was touched and translated this into an intensity for the stimulation at this point. To further enhance the sensation, CyberSM III, stored the last three touches and played all three out simultaneously through vi The CyberSM projects, confronted not only problems of using the human body as an interface, but cultural perceptions of touch as well. The first, and most obvious cultural problem is our relationship to touch between two people. Because the most common touch between people, indeed for many people, the only touch between people, is sexual, CyberSM was immediately named the first functional cybersex system, and magazines and television programs were full of the distorted capabilities of the amazing CyberSM system ("4,ooo volts of electricity pulsing up and down your legs," claimed one magazine). However, aside from the media hype, everyone who tried on the suits agreed they were interesting, but far from fulfilling. The suits could only control a very limited number of stimulators, so we placed these stimulators on either the most sensitive regions of the body, or regions which best fit the construction of the suit. When we touch each other, the location and quality of the touch convey more meaning than the simple act of touching. The suits design never allowed this kind of subtlety.

  • "I met up with two Germans. Stahl Stenslie and Kirk Woolford who had invented a truly interactive sex suit that connected with visuals of body representation on screen. We wanted to work together. Prejudice and sexual fear put paid to their project and my ideas. They stopped working with machine sex altogether." - "Virtual Sex: The Killer VR Application: Coming to terms with the Sexual Ghost in Virtual Space," Trudy Barber, London, February 1997.
    
    
  • SimSkin
    
    
• VR: "The world that I had devised was a very basic one. The object of the environment was to perform a simple task: To position a huge condom over a large virtual penis." - "Virtual Sex: The Killer VR Application: Coming to terms with the Sexual Ghost in Virtual Space," Trudy Barber, London, February 1997.
  
  
• Obstacles to full-on VR ("Sex toys blaze tactile trail on Net," MSNBC, 1999):

  In order to create a realistic computer-simulated environment that would allow a user to "touch" other inhabitants of the virtual universe, tactile sensors must be able to both register the computer user’s position and render feedback, said Ian Davis, director of technology with computer game-maker Activision.
  
  ‘A LOT OF OBSTACLES’
  "There are a lot of obstacles," he said. "The underlying technology is pretty rudimentary right now. There is some ability to do ‘force feedback’ and some ability to measure the location and angles of joints on the human body, but it isn’t robust yet and is still years away from being technically solid."
  
  Mel Siegel, a senior research scientist in robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, said the biggest problem is the complexity of the information required for the brain to determine the shape and texture of an object.
  
  "You put your finger down on a complex surface and you really don’t get a great deal of information from that," he said. "You now move your finger over that complex surface and you start to understand the shape and structure of what you’re feeling. And I think the hard part (of simulating touch) is that dynamics."
  
  That hurdle has stopped previous attempts to incorporate any but the most basic tactile sensations in computer applications, and it will again prevent the technologies pioneered by the cyberdildonics and the cyber sex suit from having much of an impact, said computer scientist and high-tech visionary Jaron Lanier, credited with coining the term "virtual reality."
  
  "There have been things like this for a long time," said Lanier, who recalled seeing similar suits and remote-controlled dildos more than a decade ago. "…I think there’s nothing new here except for the scale of it. There’s a lot of money and a lot more people on the Internet now, so from a social point of view this would be new. But I’m going to predict failure for it."
  
  
  "Serious VR sex is sadly lacking in money or research. It's full of seedy back streets and lack of interest. But it is going to be a vital part of VR. If VR allows people to take control of their fantasies, then it seems absurd to deny them sexual fantasy. In VR you can be multi-gendered ambisextrous. If you can penetrate yourself, why bother with anyone else? But VR won't just be masturbation - if you are working away from home, you can still keep a relationship alive, virtually. It changes the way people think about themselves." - Trudy Barber
  
  
  "...virtual reality and sex is an area that is being explored by a number of groups--some with a clear profit motive, others because of a profound interest in studying the nature of human sexuality as revealed by and in relation to virtual environments." - Is the Elephant Really There? - Virtual Reality in Education, (A seminar presentation made by Dr Colin Macpherson and Dr Mike Keppell at Central Queensland University on 3 October 1997)
  

• "A Female's View: Sex In Virtual Reality" - Sherry Epley, Cyberedge