When I was 13, I picked up the first issue of a new Australian games magazine called Hyper. Inside was a story — predicting the ways we’d all “soon” be having virtual sex — that has lived with me to this day.
Partly because of the bold predictions being made. That due to advances being made in the initial VR boom of the early 90s, we’d all soon be putting on suits that allowed for “Teledildonics”.
Teledildonics calls not for sex with robots, but for…suits that will allow teleprocessing to create virtual bodies for their wearers. Couples…will meet at a location in cyberspace, where the host computers will transmit the suit’s data in both directions, and cause the appropriate sensation in the suits of each participant.
Partly because, in true (and beautifully naive) early-90s “cyber” style, ambition had ridden roughshod over practicality, and people’s imaginations were running wild:
It may even be possible, before clambering into one’s virtual sex suit, to paw through one’s collection of sex CDs and select the option of meeting Elle McPherson on a beach in Bali, and having her be a lesbian for the evening. Or perhaps you’d like to divest Luke Perry of his virginity?
Mostly, though, it has stuck with me for decades because of this image.
When you’re 13, and you open up a video games magazine and see that shit, it leaves a mark. Because…well, because of everything about it.
What’s funny now, though, looking at them in a world where virtual reality has finally made it from the arcade into the living room, is that…the mock-up wasn’t that far off. The headset, the cables…that’s how both the Oculus Rift and Vive work, and it’s about the same scale, too.
Only…well, yeah, neither of those come with giant dick machines or boob-grabbing robot hands.
Yet.
To be fair to the article and its star-gazing, it does devote an entire section to the roadblocks standing in the way of our bright future of virtual boots-knocking. Stuff like:
Computers capable of the blazing speed and power necessary to drive a realistic VR of the kind sex will require do not as yet exist.
Even today’s fastest graphics computers, the new Indigo series manufactured by Silicon Graphics, which can produce video and audio input in real time, have no chance of producing VR alone. Machines capable of doing so may require experimental microprocessors which use light instead of electricity.
There was also the matter of those teledildonic suits costing $US750,000 ($984,072) (and those are 1993 dollars). And even if you had that money, they couldn’t do everything that was being asked of them.
To bring people back to reality, the last page of the feature introduces us to “Virtual Valerie”, who was “as close as we get to virtual sex at the moment.”
She was not very close.
It’s funny looking at the wildest 1993 predictions for virtual sex and the 2016 reality. The technology got where it needed to get without the need for light processors, but at the same time, our expectations for VR scaled back significantly. In 1993, we wanted dick suits and Elle Macpherson! In 2016, we’re happy with goggles and jerking off.
If you want to read the feature yourself, there’s a scan of it over on Old Game Mags.
UPDATE: Thanks to Kyle Machulis for pointing out that the teledildonic images actually originate from issue #2 of Future Sex magazine, which has also been scanned, and which you can check out here (NSFW warning).
Comments
17 responses to “VR Sex, As Predicted By An Australian Games Magazine”
Couple things:
I vaguely remember a Cindy Crawford feature/series about the subject back in the day. Maybe it was in a magazine. No, not that kind of magazine. Not quite Women’s Day/New Idea but a female-targeted one YOU HAD NO CHOICE to read when waiting for your haircut in a salon after school back then.
Please track down the person who penned this, he’s the gamer version of Neo now probably.
To be honest, why would you go to that trouble when you could do it better yourself?
Not sure I still have the magazine but the Chun Li poster from it is floating around somewhere
I will point out that 14 year old me bought this magazine largely (but, honestly, not solely) on the basis of this article. Worth it!
Wow Hyper, you are really getting a lot of millage out of this article from almost 25 years ago
Seems to be brought up quite regularly
Why can’t the mans suit have robot breast hands. Some men like having their breasts touched too.
Thanks for the NSFW thumbnail ya jerks.
You’re on the wrong site then, little dude.
Here’s your alternative: http://christian-gaming.com/
wtf kind of site is that
I just spent way too much time at that site :/
lol i still remember this article…. in fact it’s the only article i really remember from the early Hyper days. Funny that.
Wow I remember this one. My dad bought me a huge stack of Hyper magazines from a garage sale when I was around 11-12 and this one was in the stack! Amazing.
Still remember buying the first issue for 5 bucks! I was drawn by the street fighter 2 and mortal Kombat reviews tho. As a SNES fan it appalled me that Sega got the better marks for both! I think?
crop out the female and do a “caption this” on old mate.
That image. It being posted here has brought it back to me like it was a repressed memory or something haha. I think my much younger self was surprised that a gaming magazine could get away with printing it.
Good to bring back memories of Hyper though, I read that a lot in the SNES generation.
Or roughly 1,000 evenings with mid to high-end escorts.
I had that very issue. weeks later mum found it, read the front cover, found the article and glued the pages together…
Isnt one of the issues with the advancement of teledildonics is that one patent troll company actually owns the patent on it?? Will see if I can find some info.
http://gizmodo.com/sorry-you-cant-have-any-more-sex-toys-because-of-this-p-1719816692