Sex & Games

I work in educational robotics, and found that a large portion of the people interested in engineering education were either less than 20 years old, or older than 35. There was a gap in the 18-35 demographic, which makes sense. Between those ages, people are usually interested in establishing a career, building a life for themselves, and generally doing things which require a lot of time and concentration. Picking up something like an engineering book isn't really the lightest of reading, nor do many people find it relaxing or fun. So, instead of trying to aim people toward creating battle bots or RC cars or whatever else most hobby engineering books teach these days that will only interest a certain group of people, I decided to go with something everyone knows, sex.

Sex is an interesting topic in engineering education. Thanks to the need for continuation of the species, humans are engrained with some knowledge of sex when they are born. It's taboo in some cultures, normal in others, but when you get down to it, *everyone* involves themselves in the same action in order to reproduce. So, instead of having a project with an end goal that needs to be explained, you have a positive output of better sex (or at least, some physically sexual actuation). The physics and mechanics are all just part of nature, so there's not a ton of theory to explain before the project will make sense.

Sex also provides a very humorous platform to work with. Instead of dry, theory-equation-code type tutorials, Slashdong is written in a very informal, tounge-in-cheek style. People learn better when they're entertained, and the combination of sex and humor has made for some of the most well-known literature and film of our time, so why not use that to teach?

Lately, we've been working on the idea of engineering projects as sexual education. There are a lot of rather fringe sexual practices (i.e. fetishes) out there that people aren't aware of because they aren't well known. Once people build our basic projects, we present them with new projects involving things such as BDSM and electrostimulation. It allows them to turn the knowledge they've gained in engineering basic sex toys toward learning about new forms of sexual gratification.

The SeXBox was the first project I built to combine the education ideas that I stated above with the immersive environment research I do for NP Labs. Video games have come a long, long way in the last decade in terms of technical achievements and gameplay depth. Visual and auditory feedback have gone from huge blobs of color and chip tunes to 1080p resolutions with 7.1 surround sound. However, for haptic feedback, we're still stuck with a controller that vibrates in your hands. There's certainly a decent amount creative work you can do (one of my favorites still being the heartbeat felt when you hold the hand of the girl in Ico), but it's silly to stop there, when you have the rest of the body to use. That's why I created the SeXBox.

The SeXBox consists of an XBox controller with 2 3/32" audio jacks installed in the back. The 3/32" audio plug just happens to be the standard for most modular sex toys these days. If you buy a toy with a vibrating egg attachment, you'll most likely find this plug. The jacks are soldered directly to the pads of the force feedback motors, so when the force feedback signal is passed to the motors, it goes directly to the toy instead, creating vibrations that can be used anywhere on the player's body.

In the tutorials for building the SeXBox controller, people can learn about how motors, electricity, and basic voltage regulation works. After they learn the theory, they can then go on to build their own projects that use the Force Feedback signals. For instance, a player could hook up the force feedback signals to lights in the room while playing a survival horror game, making the lights flicker on and off whenever they are hit. There's a ton of little, interesting projects that can be bred from harnessing feedback signals for environmental stimulus, all it takes is the basic knowledge of how to put it together.

Lastly, the SeXBox provides a very, very cheap way to engage in remote sexual relations. Teledildonics (computer controlled remote sex) is still a fairly new industry, but commerical services charge $100+ for a toy, after which users are still tied in with monthly fees to use the services to run that toy. Our goal is to give users not only a way to have discrete, secure, cheap (the sexbox can be built for <$50) relations, but to also provide a platform they can develop for their own needs and interests.

This brings up the major reason why MMOs foster sexual environments: Safety. It's difficult to safely experiment with a fetish in real life due to possible social reprocussions. People can be seeing going to clubs, overheard talking, so on and so forth. The internet remedied part of this by providing people with discussion forums and widely available pornography. However, virtual worlds allow people to come one step closer to actually engaging in these situations, while still being able to hit the "off" button easily. "Alt+F4" is the ultimate safe word (at least, in Windows :) ).