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Comment by Nursie | Hacker News Reader

Now you can have sex without even touching another human being!

Yeah, this is one activity I think I've going to stick to the old meatspace/wetware paradigm for, sorry guys.

OTOH I'm sure it's a fun device to work on :)

I'm not sure how dismissing your post is meant to be- but many people in long distance relationships would love having such a product.

Yes I did think that might be one application, though I'm not sure how sold I would be even then. To each their own, and perhaps it would be better than nothing, but it would kill the intimacy aspect for me.

Intimacy is the name of the game, forget the dildos and fleshlights -- these robots "mirror" each other one to one in both motion and resistance. just using your hands you can push back and forth on each other and it's a very intimate feeling of being connected physically.

I appreciate this may work for some folks, but it's never going to replace having limbs wrapped around each other and collapsing in a sweaty heap afterwards.

And sure, this is opening up a entirely new avenue on top of phone/cyber/webcam sex that wasn't available before, and marks a massive step forward in what's available when people are geographically separate.

At some point the robots will have limbs and sweat.

It would obviously be far from perfect, but for a LDR, the basic question would be whether it was better than phone sex, right?

Well yes, absolutely.

I tend not to bother with LDRs either, I must admit, I think they're mostly a bad thing.

I agree about LDRs in the long term, but if you're apart for a period due to career or life circumstances it's different, and some working relationships can start long distance and work out if someone moves.

* raises hand* I'm in an LDR and may only see her twice a year (each time for a month or two) but this doesn't excite me at all. Perhaps it's just the fact that I keep seeing people shout look someone solved the problem of LDRs which just makes me roll my eyes - the inability to have sex in certain times of the year is the least of our worries.

If anyone wants to "solve the problem of LDRs", I'd much prefer them to as a look at things like immigration laws, international transport, cultural barriers.

Lots of people who have sexual partners in meatspace still use toys, quite a lot actually. There's no comparing a regular human phallus to a fucksaw, or a hitachi, or a sybian.

Sure they do. Sometimes alone, sometimes together. As a male I find them less interesting and I find the idea of remote fucking pale in comparison to the real.

What we've invented here is a new channel for intimacy that falls somewhere between a webcam chat and being in the same room -- it's a big deal!

The idea's been around for decades. I am impressed if you're actually going to bring it to market though, that will be novel. I think most exploration of this space has either been entirely hypothetical or just prototyped and then abandoned.

--edit-- wondering why the downvote? This is factual. If you want to downvote my negative opinions then go ahead, but this stuff has been showcased multiple times over the last 20/30 years and never delivered.

I'd say where everyone else failed was a concentration on porn, toys, and gimmicks. The leap here is the application of robotics, which really solved all of the problems that held the technology side of this back.

Now we're just up against society and challenging a traditionally "organic" space of someones life with artificial augmentations -- which some are excited for, but others are very defensive and scared, or just satisfied with their live-in partner that never spends the night away.

This is a transition period, and our approach is meant to provide the killer app for these devices as well as aggregate the demand for user to user haptic experiences. With this approach we are attempting to incentivise third parties to further innovate and provide new more exciting opportunities to connect over distance in the future knowing that they would immediately have an eager engaged community to appreciate their contributions.

Reminds of the sex scene from the movie Demolition Man with Sylvester Stallone and Sandra Bullock. Here's the link to the particular scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k80UQWWUIYs [May be nsfw]

This is actually just one of the reasons why I'm not that worried about overpopulation on Earth.

Sex by touching other human beings is a pretty risky enterprise when you get right down to it.

It's true, but you only live once and what's life without risk?

With all of the other risks we take on a daily basis, I'm more than willing to take a few risks to have sex with a human partner.

Look at me, I have a girlfriend.

LOL. Not right now, unfortunately, no.

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