Tele-dildonics is currently defined as: "Sex in a computer simulated virtual reality, especially computer-mediated sexual interaction between the presences of two humans."
Teledildonics was a term originally coined in the 1980s by Ted Nelson, however, the term is best associated with Howard Rheingold's 1991 book Virtual Reality. In a chapter entitled "Teledildonics," Rheingold describes his fantasies of having virtual reality sex over the Internet, but wisely mentions the difficulties in making a virtual reality sex suit.
The roots of tele-dildonics sexual communications began via text and early BBS MUD environments, moved to pictures, early video games, and finally the video conferencing of today.
One of the first generation of sexual computer games, "Leisure Suit Larry," published by Sierra On-Line, Inc. in 1988, featured the adventures of a nerd wearing the Travolta style white suit cruising around hoping to meet and date women. Around the same time Chicago cartoonist Mike Saenz designed "MacPlaymate." This was a program by which the user used the mouse to control a virtual vibrator that massaged an onscreen woman until she squealed in ecstasy. Saenz soon followed with "Virtual Valerie," generally the same cartoon of passive but with color graphics delivered upon CD-ROM, which soon became the biggest-selling CD-ROM for the Macintosh around that time.
Let's fast forward to the '90s. The 1990s will prove to be about redirecting multi-media stimulated bacchanalian sexual entertainment to the next level of technology. In early 1997 the online trade journal Inter@ctive Week estimated the approximately 10,000 adult sites then online were generating about $1 billion in revenue per year, mostly through credit card transactions. Some large sites were bringing in more than $1 million per month.
Today there are hundreds of thousands of websites and we are involved in a multi-billion dollar industry. As sexual content was the marketable application that drove the VCR and camcorder markets, online sex has proven to be the "sticky app" that has driven interactive Web technology to the next level.
At the dawn of the 21st century we introduced our first internet controlled sex machine, thethrillhammer thethrillhammer is a tele-dildonic fully-functional sex machine with a Sybian-style female gratification device with various after market modifications. It's capable of 150 RPM spinning rotation for G-spot stimulation and vibration speeds in excess of 6,500 RPM for clitoral stimulation.
Introduced in Las Vegas during the January 2001 Internext adult internet industry convention this e-commerce version of thethrillhammer is comprised of a surprisingly comfortable deco 1920s-era gynecological chair built by a company in the days of yore called "Champion". The chair is accompanied with the aforementioned "gratification device," a series of Geiger-esque halogen lights to illuminate the rider, a monitor, proprietary software, and a remote control that can be used by the rider or an onlooker, either in person or anywhere in the world via the Internet.
This version has been specifically designed so that Internet surfers can log into a web plug-in and control its stimulation of a female rider in one of our webcasting studios. End users can control the "gratification device," the pan/tilt/zoom of the camera, and even control some of the studio lighting to create atmosphere.
thethrillhammer is the first commercial teledildonic sex machine.