By Erik Jay
According to a 10-year-old New York Times article from October 2000, some 20 percent of AT&T broadband customers were paying considerable amounts of money to watch real live sex online. With speeds now considered glacially slow, cable and DSL service cost upwards of $60, and viewing a short film could set you back $10.
By 2003, a study by Nielsen/NetRatings was reporting that pornography and music/film piracy were the most influential factors driving broadband penetration. In other words, what everyone in the porn business knew intuitively, and could discuss anecdotally, finally got its scientific imprimatur. In 2010, this should all be common knowledge, though it might be distasteful for some of the Religious Right to admit.
Because of a huge audience willing to spend hardearned cash on personal, media-centric sexual entertainment, innovators and entrepreneurs coalesced to create the content and the tools that consumers needed. Porn-driven advances include modern means of credit card clearing, the discovery of browser security holes, traffic optimization, mobile services and encryption technologies.
Today, one of the biggest areas of development in the porn industry is adding the sense of touch to technology, called haptics. Even with the advent of live chat, the porn experience was insensate and two-dimensional, at best. Certainly, porn consumers wanted to be on the receiving end, but the first use of haptics headed in the other direction.
"Teledildonics" is the term author and sex educator Violet Blue, proprietress of the not-safe-for-work site Tiny Nibbles, gave to the first generation of tech-enabled peer-to-peer sex work. Adding a remote-controlled sex toy to a live webcam session was a natural progression, with Blue telling PC World magazine that it may herald "the death of the pimp." Although that hasn't happened, Blue assures interested parties that "it remains in lucrative commercial use." In 2010, you can expect a two-lane highway, thanks to another frontier in haptics.
The first haptics-based sex simulator with a 21st century pedigree, RealTouch, is a product of Internet video technology leader AEBN, one of the pioneers of video-on- demand. The device itself is a cross between a football and a rocket model, somehow appropriate as it was developed and tested by a former NASA scientist. Its array of heating elements, moving parts, belts and assorted gadgets work together to mimic authentic sexual acts — blowjobs, vaginal and anal intercourse, hand jobs and more.
Read the full article at: http://www.xbiz.com/articles/117309
