Franklin's Sex Tech: the Bionic Cock

I’ve moved some of my weird mad-science sex stuff to its own site: Tentacle.love.

Some while ago, I read an article about a gizmo made of a black and white video camera attached to a grid of electrodes. The idea is that you wear the electrodes on your tongue. Images from the video camera are converted into patterns of electric signals on the electrode, so you "see"--with your tongue--what the camera sees.

Early users of the prototype gizmo would wear a blindfold and then try to navigate around just by the electrical impulses on their tongues. What's most interesting is not only were they able to do this, but they reported that, after a while, their memories were not of sensations on their tongues, but of seeing a fuzzy, black and white image.

The brain is wonderfully plastic, able to interpret new kinds of sensory input in amazing ways. It can rewire itself to accommodate the new input; in fact, the tongue-electrode thing is being commercialized as a device for the blind.

As I do, when i first heard about this, I naturally thought "how can this be used for sex?" And I think it has fantastic potential.

Imagine, if you will, a wearable dildo, rather like the Feeldoe, that's designed to have one end inserted in the vagina. Only imagine that we take the same kind of electrodes used in the tongue-camera device, and send signals to the electrodes not from a video camera, but from small touch sensitive sensors mounted just below the skin of the dildo.

These sensors would be mapped onto the electrodes so that when something touches the sensor, you'd feel a corresponding signal from the corresponding electrode.

I'm not an artist, but I made a couple of crude animations to illustrate the idea:

What would happen?

My hypothesis was that after a period of adjustment, this dildo would be incorporated into the brain's somatosensory perception. The brain would, in essence, modify its model of the body to accommodate the dildo--it would, rather quickly I suspect, cease to be perceived as a thing and become perceived as a part of the body. Stimulation of the dildo would begin to feel like stimulation of yourself.

I blogged about this idea, and was completely unprepared for the responses. Within twenty minutes of the first blog post going up, I had people calling me offering me money to try to make it happen.

I own a patent on this technology, and I have established a company, Tacit Pleasures, to try to commercialize the device.

I have built several prototypes, and discovered the idea works, and not only that, it works quite well. We presented a crude early prototype at the Arse Elektronika sex tech convention in San Fransisco, where we won a Golden Kleene award for sex tech innovation.

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