In part one of the Je Joue post, I said I was going to take some time
trying out the software (and playing with the output file format, you
know, for research purposes). However, the more I started reading, the
more I realized that I was a little too snarky in my first post.
In fact, I may actually be impressed by this! No, seriously!
So, first off, lemme get my facts straight. The Je Joue is absolutely
nothing like the Ultime, outside of the ergonomic form factor. All the
Ultime does is vibrate. For 400$US, you better be rockin' some god
damn worlds, and now that I've actually done a smidge o' homework, I
think they may be onto something here. At least, assuming you're
female.
The Je Joue consists of a "Pleasure Pad", which from what I can tell
looks like a soft pad with two bumps and some ridges on it (The
exercise of "Where does this go on the female anatomy" is left as an
exercise to the reader). The pad has 3 DOF (2 lateral, 1 rotation),
though one of the lateral axis is vibration, but I guess that counts.
Anyways, in non-technical terms, that means it can move up and down,
turn in either direction, and buzz.
Because I love drawing with my mouse, here's a diagram:
So, that's already pretty neat. It's more than just a buzz-buzz.
However, the smartness really comes in the software and interface. The
Je Joue comes with a piece of software called PleasureWear, which is
brilliant in 2 completely different ways.
The first is the fact that it's FREE, and built to be one hell of a
piece of distributable advertising. When you load the software (on
your PC or Mac. Yaaaay, apple people, you may stop running your
SymToys clients in classic mode and come join us in modern sex
toy happiness!), the first thing that pops up is a list of demo
patterns. Once you click on a pattern and hit play, the toy GUI on the
upper left hand side actually mimics the pattern feedback movement! I
downloaded the software earlier thinking it was going to be a
glorified version of FFEdit since I hadn't actually looked at the
side, so when shit started goin' all up and down and rotating, I was
like, "Whoa, maybe I shoulda snarked less", and began this post.
But wait, there's MORE! For one of the first times that I think I'm
aware of, someone has gone past the slider based GUI, and, OMG, used
PATTERNS in a non-Electrostim toy!
For those of you not into shocking yourself into ecstasy (And, really,
you should give it a shot after doing the proper reading
up), stimmers usually trade a certain type of sound file between
themselves in order to share patterns they've developed. These
patterns basically work in the same way that most toys with patterns
do (say, the Doc Johnson's iVibe, for example). There's ramps up and
down, sine/square/triangle waves, so on and so forth. Patterns are
also vitally important to teledildonics, but we'll be getting to that
in our UI article that will be up soon.
Usually, manufacturers provide a static set of patterns (i.e. iVibe
again) stored on a uC (microcontroller, something we'll explain in the
SBv5 tutorial, also up soon. Boy, I've got a lot of writing to do),
and that's all you get. The Je Joue, however, allows you to load
different patterns onto your toy through the USB port. These patterns
are called Grooves, a term I'll try to use for the rest of the article
because I'm obviously being a marketing shil in the first place.
Anyways, Grooves are put together in the PleasureWare software.
Here's what the software looks like. Each little patch at the bottom
is a type of movement. Each of these will be some permutation of the
up and down movement, rotation, and vibration capabilities. To add it
to your Groove, You just drag the pattern to the timeline on top.
After this, when you select the Groove piece, you can change different
attributes, noted by the sliders below the bar. These are related back
visually by changes in the texture of the groove patch on the
timeline.
Not only is there an easy way to build Grooves, the sharing mechanisms
are also built into the software. You can have a buddy list of people
you usually share Grooves with. Once again, fucking brilliant idea
here. Not only does it mean that the usability of sharing is built
into the software, the fact that the software handles it versus a
webpage will give people an added sense of security, since there's no
transfer step in Groove retrieval.
My only complaint so far (and this is as an "advanced end user", more
commonly referred to by customer service departments as "asshole") is
the fact that you can't use grooves as objects, i.e. there's no
MetaGroove categories where you could chain current grooves into
another larger Groove. However, that's pretty damn nitpicky at the
moment.
So yeah, it actually feels good to say something nice about a
commercial product for once. Sure, I've never used it, I don't even
have the parts to use it. But it's different, the interface is
awesome, and the sharing capabilities are spot on.
Fuckin' A.
