Real Touch: The Finger Review
I’m sitting on the edge of a bed in someone else's hotel room in Glendale, Arizona with my fingers knuckles deep inside Real Touch. Most of the time professional conferences don’t start off for me in such a semi-clandestine way, but I came to Arizona to give a workshop on sex tech for the American Association for Sex Educators, Counselors, and Therapists annual conference and this was an invitation I couldn’t refuse.
My tour guides for Real Touch are two of the team members from AEBN, the company behind what I think will probably be the first giant leap in consumer teledildonics (after years of many smaller and clumsier steps). At least that’s what my fingers are telling me.
What Real Touch offers is tactile stimulation to accompany visual erotic imagery. That imagery might be in the form of pre-produced pornography or, eventually, it could be a live web cam feed (courtesy of either a sexual partner or a sexual professional). You put the Real Touch over your penis (or your penis inside of Real Touch, depending on where you want to place sexual agency) and you watch something sexual. As you see something happening on screen you feel a surprisingly similar thing happening inside Real Touch.
Real Touch comes equipped with two soft rubber drive belts, four vibrating areas, a heating element and the ability to deliver lubricant on command. All of these elements are programmed by AEBN to work in concert with porn (if you’re interested in the details I recommend checking out the site, it’s wonderfully easy to navigate and answers most of the questions you’ll have directly).
My fingers took a test drive of Real Touch while watching a clip from an educational sex film. As you see people engaging in penetration you feel Real Touch moving up and down in time to the penetration. When the couple moves positions Real Touch also changes. As the action progresses my fingers feel warmer and wetter thanks to the heating and lubricating properties of Real Touch (one of my guides explained that the lube chamber can be programmed to release a little or a lot of lube, such that a scene with female ejaculation can be felt as a gush of warm lube in Real Touch). They have plans to develop a dildo like toy that a partner can use to control Real Touch. When one partner strokes the dildo up and down the movements, speed, and pressure will be felt inside Real Touch. Eventually they promise to make toys for other body parts too. But being a company that makes most of its money of male porn viewers they logically started with them.
After having Real Touch on my fingers for four or five minutes, my hosts opened it up and showed me the insides of the toy. While the construction was impressive I was amazed there wasn’t more going on inside. It felt to my fingers as if there were 10 or 12 different things happening at once something that felt reminiscent of really great sex I’ve had. But the insides of Real Touch seemed orderly and logical (which is less reminiscent of really great sex I’ve had).
Not having fully tried Real Touch I still have questions and concerns. Right now Real Touch only works with video that the company has coded. So you’ll have a choice of what to use it with, but the choice will be limited to the porn the manufacturers have chosen. What I really want to see is Real Touch that can be controlled by another user with another toy.
My major concern is actually from a programming perspective. I wonder about the people who are actually coding the videos and the folks who came up with what Real Touch can do. As long as everything is closed technology users will be relying on the sexual creativity and sophistication of those making the toys and coding the videos. I think this severely limits the experience. What I’d hope for is for the company to come up with some way to let users code videos (their own or professionals) and ultimate for users to suggest other things for Real Touch to do.
What’s exciting about technology is how putting it in the hands of millions of people can morph it in ways that the developers never would have imagined. Most sex tech is closed and takes a relatively antagonistic attitude toward users. Here’s hoping the makers of Real Touch have the vision not only to make a great teledilidonic toy, but also to change the sex toy industry model.
Learn More - Real Touch Website
(note: the first few pages of the site don't have any porn on them, it's easy to avoid, but not hard to find).
Related - All About Sex Tech
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This is not “new.” It is a less capable (Less functions,) More expensive, (You have to pay by the minute forever,) than the original invention, The Virtual Sex Machine. A Virtual Reality Sexual Simulation system that has been around for years.
Like any technology, there are always knock offs of an original product. The original product here, was The Virtual Sex Machine, which is still available, and recently upgraded to a new model.
The Real Touch has way more functions that the The Virtual Sex Machine, orifice changing sizes, the dual belt motion, the lub reservoir, the heating pad… i have tried both at the AVN show last January and i can tell you that the Real Touch does feel a million times better and more Real. Furthermore, it comes with a largest selection of movies.
Hey Cory! Nice to see you’re keeping ahead of me in the teledildonics news.
I’m happy to see that the RealTouch is staying in the press. After the silence following their AVN coverage, I thought they were dead in the water. However, they seem to be doing another marketing push lately, since I’ve seen 3 references to them in the last week alone.
What I’d hope for is for the company to come up with some way to let users code videos (their own or professionals) and ultimate for users to suggest other things for Real Touch to do.
Hmmm. Who could possibly make that happen. If only there were some engineer out there…
Also: Eric, come on, just put your name on the “VSM r00ls u sux0rz” comments next time. It’s not like we don’t know it’s you. “Industry Insider” isn’t hiding anything.
@Eric: If you read my review more carefully you’ll note that I said that Real Touch was a significant step in consumer teledildonics. I don’t think they created the tech or the idea, but having met them, and knowing a bit about their business, I think they have the money, temperment, and capacity to create a sustained enough effort to make these products relatively affordable and supported. I completely agree with you that the element of having to pay for the porn while you watch the movie and use Real Touch is limiting (and expensive) and it was an oversight that I didn’t clarify that in my review, so thanks for pointing that one out. But I still maintain that what they’re doing, from a consumer perspective, is different and worth commenting on.
@qDot: you were the first person I told them about when I met them and hopefully when they get their first batch of product for sale and send me a review one they will follow my advice and send you one as well. Honestly I’d much rather if you were the benevolent dictator overseeing this, but since neither of us have that lucrative pay-per-minute porn technology funding our efforts we’ll have to wait and see.
But whenever I get a call from someone trying to develop this stuff I send them directly to Slashdong to see the attitude and approach they should be taking when developing teledildonics!
Looks like the device is finally available for purchase.
This blog completely IGNORES CiTouch. They have had cybersex available for years. Their inexpensive device connects a Fleshlight or other stroker to one of many different sites or local games.
@Jack, thanks for mentioning this. I heard about CiTouch after reading this review on Slashdong. I haven’t had the opportunity to see the CiTouch or try it out, but having talked to folks who have used it, and seeing it on their site, I would still argue that Real Touch represents a categorical leap in terms of the underlying technology and the usability. But your comment reminds me that I should once again get back in touch with the folks at CiTouch.
Eric needs to quit discrediting the RealTouch at every chance he gets. It’s lame.
The Virtual Sex Machine is not great. The experiences suck (and not in a good way). It’s too expensive. Real Touch is leaps and bounds ahead of anything the Virtual Sex Machine is. Technologically, the RT is FAR superior.
The only thing that holds RT back is the pay per minute deal. Hopefully RT gets smart and starts putting out special DVD’s with multiple experiences that activate the Real Touch machine.
Eric… you need to update that awful-looking website that hasn’t been updated in like forever (the site looks like something made on Geocities… which just shut down today, lol). It needs a total makeover.
Also, You need to get some new experiences, new girls… you need a lot of new things…
And one more thing, and I’m surprised you haven’t done this… you need to convince some of these adult studios to let you do joint deals to code for their adult movies. It would be the same movie the studio made but the box would read It would be a “VR Sex Machine Enhanced” video and they could buy it from you directly and you’d split the cut with the studio. The studio wouldn’t even have to do an ounce of work, it would be all up to you and they’d be attacking a whole new market.
It’s a great idea that would help you revive a product that obviously is dead right now. But I get the impression that you really don’t have strong relationships with too many studios, and judging from how you’ve been acting in response to RealTouch, I can see some reasons why that may be the case.