Virtual Sex

After hearing about all the amazing applications of virtual reality, inquiring ROM minds naturally wonder: What is this technology going to do for my sex life?

That depends on what you consider hot sex. Before we get into that, you should know that the inventors of virtual reality aren't inclined to talk much about this application of their research. In fact, some VR pioneers, such as Jaron Lanier, refuse to discuss it at all. Too much money has been invested, they say, to risk reducing their work to some advanced mechanism for eroticism---or to jeopardize corporate funding and industry support. Nonetheless, there are several brave souls who will discuss this delicate subject, coined "teledildonics."

One interactive turn-on, which could become a goggle-and-glove experience by the mid-Nineties, is a version of Reactor Inc.'s Virtual Valerie, an interactive game currently on CD-Rom. Created by Mike Saenz, a former Marvel Comics illustrator, Valerie is like Spider-Man's wife, Mary Jane, gone bad---real bad. She's a party girl (drawn in the anatomically appealing style of most Marvel Comics female characters) who lives in a penthouse to which you gain access with your trusty mouse. After inviting you into her living room, she asks you a few questions, such as: "Do you like my breasts?" If you give her the right answers, she'll lead you into the bedroom and, at your command, strip, vigorously masturbate and then kneel doggy-style while you plumb her inner recesses with a dildo of your choice. Eventually, if you work long enough, she has an orgasm---moaning her satisfaction in a dialog balloon hanging above her naked behind.

If you're the kind of guy who's dreamed of being the main character in an eight-pager, Valerie is at least a ticket to a microboner. And macro may not be too far off. According to Saenz, it's not inconceivable that before we have another Democratic President, Valerie or her equivalent may be available in complete 3-D with sound. You'll enter her apartment wearing goggles. She'll talk to you with a real voice, and you'll be able to "touch" her most private parts with your finger while she moans in sync.

Further down the road, the potential for virtual sex gets even more interesting, both tactilely and socially. For example, within the next five to six years it may be possible to stimulate a virtual female and to be stimulated by her.

"We've already achieved the first step in that direction with audiovisual stimulation," says Saenz. "For most guys, just having the power to command a gorgeous woman to remove her clothes is a pretty powerful turn-on. Add to that a way to generate the tactile simulation of, say, a blow job or hand job. Communicate the reaction through a 3-D digitizing device and then through a fiber-optic line that goes from the computer into a sort of 'dick sleeve,' and you could probably approximate the sensation that is synchronized in the audiovisual presentation.

"Other than being disease-free, it doesn't mean much in terms of smell, flesh, touch and all those things real people enjoy. But it's the male equivalent of the vibrator.

"Actually, the best product somebody could come out with right now," Saenz says, "would be a VR version of How to Pick Up Girls. It would be a sort of cyberspace primer for shy guys. They could practice their seductive techniques on virtual women who will reward them for saying the right things and dis them for saying stuff that turns women off."

Another visionary who has seen our cybersexual future is Timothy Leary, former Harvard researcher and psychedelic voyager who is now a frequent lecturer on the potentials and pitfalls of virtual reality. According to Leary, the dick sleeve is not so far off. "There's already a company in England that has developed a pneumatic bladder that can be inflated and deflated very quickly under computer control.

"The time lag on the thing is still awfully slow. It can't keep up with the computer commands. And, of course, that's not what sex is all about. Real sex can only be experienced between two humans.

"Ultimately," says Leary, "the most important purpose of virtual reality is human communication, for fun, for pleasure, for sociability and for family entertainment. Electronic sex will be a minor issue. In fact, the best thing you could do after visiting someone in cyberspace would be to hop into a cab and meet for the real thing."