tl;dr
No, I haven't been living under a rock. Yes, I've heard about Durex
Fundawear.
I really have very little snide and belittling to say about it. I
think they actually did a pretty fucking good job. If the dude that
lead the design team had not decided to go the "we're the first EVAR"
route, this would be a completely positive article. But we can't have
everything we want.
Durex Fundawhat?
If you haven't heard about the Durex Fundawear, watch these two things
first so I don't have to be all SPOILERS and shit.
Oh my sweet fucking jesus at the time of this writing there's 3.6
MILLION views of that video. This is what happens when a company that
knows their brand decides to use it.
The "How they did it" video:
Basically, arduino with some sort of network shield, and cell phone
vibrators. Hey, interaction design students, remember when this was
your junior year project? Remember how many views your project video
got? KNEEL TO YOUR ESTABLISHED BRAND GODS.
Don't worry, though. Someday you too can grow a sexy scruffy beard and
a plaid shirt and be a tech lead at a fancy design firm and call
yourself the first in the world to do something that was first talked
about almost 40 years ago and has been on the market since the 90's
and that I've blogged and taught workshops on for years and
helped make a dedicated arduino shield for
and is now a common IXD student project. I WON'T BE BITTER.
NOT AT FUCKING ALL.
No. Really. See Also:
"Underwear and touch and remote presence is something that's never
been done"
"This is a project about transferring touch across mass distances,
and that's a first, globally."
- Ben Moir, dude that doesn't do his fucking research
So, a few quick references for ya.
Grr. No one ever let this man get robotics based surgery with haptic
controls. Because it obviously doesn't exist.
Ok. I feel better. I'll stop now.
The Facts
According to
someone on twitter who knows these things,
Fundawear is simply an experiment. Only 10 sets of them exist. Durex
is contemplating commercialization.
Even so, this is getting a LOT of press. Last I checked there were
10's of articles on major sites about this, and 3.6 million hits over
3 days isn't too shabby for a sex tech project.
The Good Parts
Ok, with that out of the way, let's get on to why I like Fundawear.
It's accessible. It isn't insertible, it's just wearable. One of the
major freakout factors of sex toys is that you have to put something
in them or put them in you. Then you have to hook it to a piece of
hardware that you may not even trust to make phone calls or print
pages, much less manipulate your bits. With Fundawear, well, you have
to put yourself in it, yes. But that's not quite the same.
Expanding on the lack of bits manipulation, Fundawear seems more like
a foreplay toy than an in the act toy. It's a way to caress someone's
erogenous zones over distances, versus poke/stroke them. This means
less to go wrong because you aren't promising orgasm, you're just
promising tickling. That's a far easier promise to fulfill than the
"GONNA MAKE YA CUM" of most sex toys.
While I rant and rail about how it's got all of the creativity of a
student project, it's also as easy to grasp as a student project. A
lot of the work I do around teledildonics isn't really graspable by
those that aren't familiar with the tech world. Fundawear keeps it
simple enough to let people go "Oh. I touch this thing and I move
that. Awesome."
There are lot of problems of current teledildonics that Fundawear
either skirts or just plain solves.
- Obtaining: Durex has access to a LOT of storefronts that usual
teledildonics devices do not. They could easily ship this to stores
that will stock it next to their condoms, winning the impulse-buy
market flat-out compared to online buy-and-wait.
- Interface: Since you're caressing areas, not manipulating nono
zones, you can be a lot more playful. It's just fun, not a means to
an end.
- Usage Interruption: One of the big problems with teledildonics is
that it's usually attached to data streams like video conferencing.
There's a LOT that can go wrong with this, especially if you're in
the middle of doing... things. Since Fundawear is just foreplay,
having disconnection issues isn't quite as jarring.
- Cleaning: Just throw it in the wash! Not so easy with dildos or
tubes or whatever.
The Iffy Parts
Outside of my own ranting above, there's really not a lot that's
outright wrong with this project. It's an experiment, and I think it
works well as that. It'll hopefully get people thinking more about
remote sex via technology, in ways that are accessible to those that
won't just stick whatever in whatever 'cause there's some circuits in
it (STOP JUDGING ME).
Returning to my above point about the simplicity of Fundawear, I also
wonder if that might be its downfall as a product. It seems like the
initial experience is pretty powerful. But if commercialized, what
would reuse be like? I have no stats about how things like Highjoy or
Sinulate were used/reused by consumers, so I'm not sure what kind of
precedents we have thus far.
Turning Fundawear into a product seems difficult. It's presented as
undergarments that have the vibrators embedded. Actually making
undergarments that will fit a majority of people is no small task.
This is one place where sex toys excel. We can assume they'll either
be pokey or poked in, and that people have pokey or pokey-inny (or
both!) bits for them to be used on, probably of a certain size. The
larger the surface area of the body you have to cover with your
product, the more complicated things become. They could easily make
this a clip-on system so it would work with whatever you might already
have (and hugely increase their market share as people add it to
fetish garments instead of just underwear), which could solve this
problem.
Conclusion
It's kinda awesome to see big brands venturing into wearable intimate
interfaces in a way I don't hate. We've gotta get a market around this
stuff one way or another if it's ever to be viable, and I've seen a
lot of false starts and stupidity. While not wholly original,
Fundawear seems like a good beginning toward mainstream realization of
sex tech.
