Picture a time when VR isn’t worn but is part of our homes—or our bodies
Thanks to a spate of recent breakthroughs, haptic technology is inching closer to its goal of making virtual reality feel as good and lifelike as it looks.
One such innovator is Emerge, who entered into a multi-year agreement with Disney last year so that fans could enjoy and share a variety of tactile experiences through their multisensory platform.
Eric Bautista, Disney’s director of consumer products, games, and publishing, told VentureBeat, “For many fans of The Walt Disney Company, the fondest memories lie in the shared moments forged through the stories we’ve told over the past 100 years. Through our partnership with Emerge, we’re thrilled to leverage their technology platform to add a deeper level of ‘feeling’ to these stories and iconic moments that have only been left to the imagination—to experience directly in their homes.”
Touched by sound
Taking a less physical approach than haptic developers such as WeTac’s Electrotactile Gloves or even Glasgow University’s streams of tightly focused air, Emerge instead utilizes ultrasonic waves.
Launched in 2021, their laptop-sized prototype successfully produced a variety of tactile sensations, though reports are somewhat vague about what they were or how lifelike—or not—they felt.
Recommended Read: Sooner Than Tomorrow: Is Fully Immersive VR Sex Right Around the Corner?
Isaac Castro, Emerge’s CEO, however remains optimistic, “A few years from now, we’ll look back at our current digital interactions the same way we see our carbon emissions today. With 33% of the world population feeling disconnected from others, this loneliness epidemic is already one of the greatest life threats of our time. It’s time for a communication platform centered around what truly matters—our emotional connection with others.”
New realities, new pleasures
Emerge’s haptic tech may not be intended for VR systems, but there’s no reason not to assume that at some point in the future, it—or something very much like it—could provide users with previously undreamed-of levels of immersion.
However, even if we can construct full-tactile-equipped rigs, there will always be a pronounced, if not outright jarring, disconnect between virtual experiences and those in the real world.
As in making sure you’re not going to bump into any real furniture, walls or other people; seating all that hardware on your head; fumbling for either your controls or your preferred choice of teledildonic equipment; and so on, so forth.
Just as Emerge’s prototype was no doubt big and likely bulky, so too the hardware side of VR will grow steadily smaller, more compart, and less intrusive.
Emerge’s use of ultrasonics could potentially eliminate the need for frustratingly uncomfortable haptic rigs by stimulating the user’s sense of touch while simultaneously providing tactile sensations.
For hearing and vision, future VR rigs may be as tiny and practically undetectable as a pair of AR/VR contacts as, ultrasonic tech that gives us our sense of touch gives us our sense of touch might also deliver totally immersive soundscapes.
Walk into new sexual worlds
Here’s an interesting question: What happens when thoroughly advanced VR and reality become nearly indistinguishable from one another? Right now, there’s that hardware wall I mentioned, but once that’s all but gone, how can we tell the difference?
Maybe we won’t have to. Perhaps moving from our world into an infinite number of totally immersive sexual wonderworlds will be as second nature as stepping from one room to another.
In fact, why couldn’t we have a virtual door, like something out of an erotic version of Alice In Wonderland, that’s only there whenever we want it to be: a portal that, once on the other side, would be a domain as limitless as our sexual imaginations?
New fantasies, new possibilities
All this seems a bit too far-fetched. Agreed, though only a short while ago, VR was barely hypothetical, and now super high-end rigs like the Valve Index are a few mouse clicks and a fairly hefty bank balance away.
In the meantime, companies like Emerge will paraphrase the Disney film Meet the Robinsons, “Keep us moving forward.”
In this case, maybe toward a time when everything’s possible, sexual or otherwise, in this world—or our virtual dreams.
Image Sources: Depositphotos
