A teledildonics “expert” and Kinect hacker thinks that sex games using Microsoft’s peripheral are a hair’s breadth away.
Kyle Machulis, aka Qdot, writes the blog Slashdong.org. In addition to being an engineer and happily engaged (to a girl!), Machulis is an expert on combining sex and technology. He’s been following the hacking of the Kinect sensor closely and has finally gotten around to writing about how he thinks the depth and camera functions of Kinect can be used to create videogames that allow you to, well, make the seXor. According to his tests, Machulis doesn’t think that the fidelity of the sensor is enough to pick up smaller objects such as genitalia, but he was successful in getting it to recognize a larger sex toy and his tongue.
“Genitalia, for the most part, are not a major geometric feature of the human body when taken in perspective of physical size (as opposed to say, genitalia perspective in relation to the ego, where they may actually make up more than 100%). Neither are they normally used in the control of videogames,” Machulis wrote. “We’re probably a few years off of the videogame market being ready for Mike Tyson’s Super Cockslap-Out.”
From there, Machulis actually does some psuedo-science to figure out how viable a sex game would be. “This is a point cloud rendering of the dildo,” he writes. “Each point represents a point of distance in space, and it’s colorized based on the RGB image we get back. Remember, we’re only getting depth information from a single source, therefore we fall prey to the shadows.”
Masturbation is a little trickier, as it will be difficult for the Kinect to distinguish between so many moving parts. “Due to the close contact of the hand with the body, possibly with some inanimate object in between, there will still have to be some calibration and thresholding to figure out exactly where the genitalia versus the hand versus the surrounding body parts are,” he said. “Masturbation and general self-manipulation is something that’s out of the kinect’s normal operating procedure, but I’m sure we’ll figure something out. We’re smart and bored, after all.”
Machulis makes a bold prediction that potential problems will be worked out soon. “None of this will or should stop people from trying. I bet we’ll see kinect porn and possibly Kinect Skype services within the month. Just don’t come crying to me when you lose side or under boob to breast shadowing or taint viewing due to ball blockage. Yes, there will be depth, but it will be very inaccurate and noisy and I think most people will just want their 2D image back. We’ve had a few millenia to get that one right, after all.”
I’m not sure how I feel about all of this. I mean, the Wii Remote sex toys were one thing, and the Rez trance vibration toy article is pretty hot, but do we really want this to be what Kinect is used for?
Source: Slashdong.org