Wednesday, Jan. 8 was the second day that the floor show was open at CES 2020— and that meant another day of morning-to-evening programming at the CNET Stage at Tech West in the Sands Convention Center in Las Vegas. 

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CES 2020 Press Day: Foldable phones, veggie pork and LG’s $60K rollable TV

CES Day 1: The show opens to more sex tech, Samsung’s Neon chat bots and Ivanka Trump

The following is the rundown of CNET’s live video programming for that day, as it happened on stage (and from across the show in Las Vegas). Feel free to scrub to the time codes indicated to jump to specific sections. 

CES 2020 replay: Wednesday, Jan. 8, 2020

Time code / time of day

00:00 / 9:00 a.m. PT: The Daily Charge: CNET’s daily podcast catches you up to all the CES news so far.

00:30 / 9:30 a.m. PT:  What’s trending at CES with Flipboard

01:00 / 10:00 a.m. PT: FreePower Wireless Charging

01:30 / 10:30 a.m. PT:  Interview: Andrei Iancu, Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office: CNET Editor-in-Chief Connie Guglielmo sits down with the Director of the US Patent and Trademark Office.

02:00 / 11:00 a.m. PT: CNET en Español: Gabriel Sama, Juan Garzón and César Salza of CNET en Español lead a Spanish-language discussion of the most important news of the show so far.

02:30 / 11:30 a.m. PT: Giorgio Moroder interview: Roadshow’s Tim Stevens interviews music legend Giorgio Moroder, who’s adding some unique sound to the otherwise silent world of electric vehicle motors.

03:00 / 12:00 noon PT: Samsung keynote (replay from Monday evening)

04:00 / 1:00 p.m. PT: Hands-on with Origin’s Big O gaming PC

04:15 / 1:15 p.m. PT: Segway booth tour

04:30 / 1:30 p.m. PT: UltraSense Touch Interface

05:00 / 2:00 p.m. PT: Torture Test with the Vegas Golden Knights: What happens when you use your favorite mobile device as a hockey puck? We’re about to find out.

05:30 / 2:30 p.m. PT: Plant-based Food Taste Test: New meat alternative products like Impossible Foods’ pork and sausage products are already a big hit of the show. Now it’s time to put these sort of plant-based foods to the ultimate (taste) test.

06:00 / 3:00 p.m. PT: The Future of Sports Betting: What better place than Las Vegas to look at the future of sports betting? CNET’s Jeff Bakalar leads the discussion.

06:30 / 3:30 p.m. PT: Smart Balance rehab system: The Neofect Smart Balance is “a Dance Dance Revolution-like device for rehabilitation of your legs, balance and posture” — and we’re getting a live demo of it on the CNET stage.

07:00 / 4:00 p.m. PT: Sex Tech at CES 2020: No longer stuck in the shadows, sex tech has taken center stage at CES 2020. CNET’s Ashley Esqueda and Caitlin Petrakovitz talk to Lora Haddock, CEO of Lora DiCarlo (maker of Osé, Baci and Onda) and Janet LIeberman-Lu, CTO and CPO of Dame Products, on the state of the sexual wellness industry in 2020 — and where it goes from here.

07:30 / 4:30 p.m. PT: WTF: What the Future Live: CNET’s future tech show hits the CES Stage with CNET’s Jesse Orrall and Andy Altman.

08:00 / 5:00 p.m. PT: Best of CES, day 2: We end the day with a look back at the coolest stuff and biggest news of the day.

More CES 2020 video

• Watch the CES 2020 press day recap
• Watch CES 2020 day 1
• Watch CES 2020 day 3

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• The Best of CES 2020
• All of the new smart home products, from smart locks to the Alexa shower head
• TVs of CES: Impressive, expensive, and less practical than ever
• Full coverage of CES 2020

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As 2020 grinds into gear, CNET will be kick-starting a new decade with a trip to the Nevada desert for the annual tech bonanza CES. When we arrive in Las Vegas, we expect to be greeted by a bunch of new TVs, scores of eccentric gadgets and a whole gaggle of robots.

We’re still some years away from robots outnumbering humans at the show, but every year it does seem as though more bots are present on the show floor. In the past decade we’ve seen robots become more complex, more affordable and more diverse. The number of contexts in which they play a role in our lives — from the home to the workplace and beyond — have expanded to provide us with a vision of how humans and robots will coexist and collaborate in the future.

At CES, we’ll likely see this broad range of robots on full display. Among the CES Innovation Award nominees alone there’s the latest Roomba robot vacuum cleaner, an esports fighting robot and the show-stealing star of CES 2019, Groove X’s huggable companion robot Lovot. 

Also back for the show will be the latest and greatest version of Omron’s ping-pong-playing robot, Forpheus, and Lora DiCarlo’s sex toy Ose, which is finally ready and on sale after being awarded an Innovation Award in 2019.

We can’t wait to be surprised and delighted by the bots on display at the show. Ahead of CES kicking off next week, here are three things we’re particularly excited to see.

Get yourself a pizza

One of the best reasons to visit Vegas is the sheer array of excellent food on offer, and at CES there’ll be one more option as Seattle-based company Picnic brings its pizza-assembly robot to the Las Vegas Convention Center.

Picnic’s robot can produce up to 300 12-inch personalized pizzas per hour, and already is doing so at T-Mobile Park in Seattle. In the future, the technology could well be adapted to make up other dishes, including buns, bowls, tortillas and plates. For now, though, pizza is the focus, and we’ll be sure to get our best taste-testers on the case of checking for even dispersal of cheese, tomato, salami and other fixings.

Picnic will reveal the exact location of its robots on its website ahead of CES — we’ll race you to the front of the queue.

Pets versus robots

Comparing robots to one another is usually a pointless pursuit, given how diverse they are in both build and purpose. The one exception is when judging which robot is the cutest — and there’s a lot of competition.

The cutest robots are often designed for the home, either as toys or as companions. The best-known of these is Sony’s Aibo, the robo-dog pet surrogate. At CES, we expect to see a number of robots who could rival Aibo for your affections.

Shenzhen-based Elephant Robotics is listed as attending the show. And although the company historically has focused on making robotic arms, we’re hoping to see another project it’s been working on. 

In December, it put its robotic feline MarsCat on Kickstarter, and we’re hoping to play with the purring, pouncing bionic robo-cat at the show. We’re also crossing our fingers that we may meet Tombot, a realistic Labrador companion robot designed for seniors with dementia.

As well as robots that are pets, we’ll also see robots for pets at the show, including the LavvieBot smart litter tray for cats and the launch of Mia, a robot that will play with your precious puss or pooch and dispense dry food and treats.

Righteous robots

One big trend at CES will be the focus on robots for good. A series of talks and panel discussions will look at the ways robots are helping humans, including the role they’ll increasingly play in saving lives and saving the planet.

The sessions will examine robots as forces for good, looking at how they’re assisting humans in preserving rare marine species deep under the sea and in exploring in outer space — the moon, Mars and beyond.

Meanwhile, Bosch will present a sensor system that’ll ride around on NASA’s Astrobee robot, which roams the International Space Station, to detect sounds that could indicate technical faults.

We’re also expecting to see a number of advances in surgical robots and robotic hands, as well as robots designed to help with care and recovery.

For all the robot news and other announcements coming out of CES, be sure to keep your eyes fixed on CNET Jan. 5-10.

Read more: The best 3D printers and scanners for makers and creators  

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Supporters, founders and employees of sex tech and women’s wellness startups like Dame Products and Unbound Babes assembled outside Facebook’s New York office Wednesday. The crowd protested the social media site’s policies, which don’t let the companies run ads for their products. 

Polly Rodriguez, CEO and co-founder of Unbound Babes, told CNET the event had a turnout of 40 to 50 founders, activists and educators.

“Our goal was to raise awareness … and I feel pretty strongly we did just that,” Rodriguez said in an emailed statement.

Alexandra Fine, CEO and co-founder of Dame Products, added that the inability to advertise “created a great deal of drag on our mission.”

“Advertising is a necessary and important part of connecting people to valuable solutions,” she said Wednesday. “There are millions of people who stand to improve their lives with our products, and they will have no idea we exist until we’re allowed to make contact with them. This doesn’t just impact a few businesses — it impacts the health and happiness of everyone who has sex.”

The protests were along the lines of the Approved, Not Approved website that the two startups launched earlier this month. Approved, Not Approved is a game that lets you guess whether an advertisement was OK’d for public consumption. 

In June, Dame Products also sued the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority for rejecting its ads for vibrators. 

The sex tech protest isn’t the first protest Facebook’s New York office has seen. In June, dozens of anticensorship activists shed their clothes to protest the social media site’s nudity rules. In the wake of the protest, Facebook began talks with the activists over a compromise.

The social media site appears to be taking the same approach this time.

“We have had open lines of communication with both companies about our policies and are always taking feedback. We are working to further clarify our policies in this space in the near future,” a Facebook spokesperson said in an email. 

Facebook also pointed out its advertising policy that refers to adult products and services. The policy says ads can’t promote any adult products and services apart from family planning and contraception. In the case of contraceptives, the ad must focus on the “contraceptive features” of the product and not “sexual pleasure or sexual enhancement.” The ad also has to be targeted to users 18 years or older.

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At CES 2019 the biggest topic, almost by accident, was sex tech. That’s because the governing body of the event revoked its Innovation Award on realizing the company behind the winning robotics technology makes sex tech products.

That company, Lora DiCarlo, makes a device that taps advanced microrobotics to give women hands-free orgasms. The company still made an appearance at a smaller nighttime show, but nowhere near the main CES show floor where it was denied placement, and not at the Innovation Awards ceremony. 

On Wednesday, the Consumer Technology Association reversed the award’s revocation, which had gotten sex tech companies, other 2019 CES attendees and the media talking about the placement of sex tech among consumer products.

“CTA did not handle this award properly,” Jean Foster, CTA’s senior vice president of marketing and communications, said in a statement. “This prompted some important conversations internally and with external advisors and we look forward to taking these learnings to continue to improve the show.”

In a follow-up call, Foster said the CTA is always looking to expand the show into new areas. “One of the benefits of CES … is the fact that we’re always looking at what are the latest innovations in consumer technology and how do we (put) them in the show.”

Foster also that said while the CTA didn’t believe there was anything fundamentally wrong with the awards, it’s reviewing policies and processes to ensure it’s following its own rules.

Lora DiCarlo said it was thankful for the restoration of the award given for the company’s work in advanced robotics.

“We appreciate this gesture from the CTA, who have taken an important step in the right direction to remove the stigma and embarrassment around female sexuality. This is a win for our engineering team, who deserve recognition for the robotic technology they developed in the making of Osé. The Lora DiCarlo team is committed to pushing the technology industry forward and to embrace female, diverse and LGBTQ innovators. We hope we can continue to be a catalyst for meaningful changes that makes CES and the consumer tech industry inclusive for all.”

Foster seemed to echo the claims, saying that the CTA is constantly asking, “How do we drive the industry forward?” As a leader on a global stage, CTA has an ability to elevate smaller, more diverse tech.

CES’ annual Innovation Awards recognize exceptional achievements in technology. In October 2018, Lora was notified it had won the CES 2019 Innovation Award in the Robotics and Drones category, an honor that would be announced at the 2019 event in Las Vegas.

That category is described on the CES site like this: “Consumer drones, consumer UAVs and other unmanned systems that are able to fly, move, or otherwise be operated from a remote location. May include secondary features such as photo/video recording, movement of materials, mapping, way-finding, search/rescue, or other capabilities.”

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Lora DiCarlo’s Osé device taps robotics to provide women with hands-free blended orgasms that involve both the clitoris and G-spot. It does this through microrobotics meant to mimic human touch in place of vibrations. The Osé (called Vela at the time of the company’s application for the CES award) is not yet available for public purchase but was evaluated by judges from various backgrounds. At the time, the device incorporated five pending patents for robotics, biomimicry and engineering feats, according to Lora DiCarlo.

On realizing what type of device the Osé, nee Vela, was, the CTA revoked the award, apologizing and saying that the Lora DiCarlo product “does not fit into any of our existing product categories and should not have been accepted for the Innovation Awards Program.” The CTA went on to say that this was because “CES is a professional business show, and porn, adult toys and sex tech products are not part of the event.”

Also on Wednesday, Lora DiCarlo announced that it had raised an additional $2 million in financing, bring its total investment to date to $3.2 million. Founder and CEO Lora Haddock said in a release that she was honored by the financial show of support: “Our investors support our mission of promoting gender equity and making societal changes that benefit everyone.”

Now the big question that remains is whether we’ll see Lora DiCarlo and other sex tech companies on the show floor at CES 2020.

Originally published 11:21 a.m. PT. Update, 1:51 p.m. PT: Adds more comment from CTA and Lora DiCarlo investment news.

The post Sex tech company Lora DiCarlo gets CES robotics award it was first denied first appeared on Joggingvideo.com.

Two years ago, Naughty America made waves at CES with its debut of VR porn — or, to be specific, 180-degree 3D videos viewable on VR headsets. Riding the coattails of upcoming VR hardware like HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, it was a return to the risque days when CES overlapped with the adult-themed AVN (Adult Video News) show, making an awkward mix of adult entertainment and tech.

This year, Naughty America lurked in a smaller closed-off demo space at the back of one of the busiest halls. Much like other years, a variety of 3D 180-degree videos were being shown on Gear VR headsets. The videos are better-made, produced with smaller, higher-quality cameras. But the general idea’s the same.

What’s different is the company’s next experiment in AR, a move hinted at a year ago when I last met Ian Paul, CIO of Naughty America. This year, he has a demo ready. “Lower your expectations; it’s the very first prototype we’ve made,” he says.

It’s not what I expect.

He shows me an app on an iPad. I see a dancer in the middle of the booth, clothed, twisting and posing. It’s a 3D render, not a video or a scan. It’s not up close, or in my face. Instead, the dancer’s at a distance, oddly removed.

It’s a demo made with ARKit, Apple’s tool for enabling augmented reality in realistic 3D on phones and tablets. The app, Paul says, will be submitted to the iOS App Store soon, and it doesn’t have any X-rated content, it’s just models of adult video stars, clothed, as if they’re standing in the room with you. It’s not much different than existing AR apps like Holo, which places celebrity impersonators in your home for AR photo opps.

The demo of the dancer is weirdly realistic (Paul says the company tried 3D scans from actual photos, but they didn’t look as good). Occasionally, people passing by break the illusion, walking through the dancer, but in general it seems effective. But to what end? The most unusual part of this AR app is that it’s aiming away from adult entertainment and pornography to something more acceptable to a greater range of people, as if Naughty America could somehow be a brand beyond porn.

“We’re not calling this AR porn,” Paul says. “And there’s a reason: We’re trying to get in the app stores.” He admits the company hasn’t had success here before, and has no idea if this will work either. In that sense, it feels like a stunt as much as an actual initiative.

Is this all happening because VR has hit a wall? Is the company looking for more ways to reach out? Paul admitted that VR use, based on what he’s observed, is flat, and Naughty America is “limited by adoption as a whole.”

Still, 25 to 40 percent of the user base is using VR, so even if it is niche, it’s “the biggest niche since MILF.” Oculus Rift owners are the biggest audience, closely followed by Samsung Gear VR.

AR on a phone is easier to use, and more devices already work with augmented reality. After a disappointing couple of years of VR hardware sales, this isn’t a surprising direction. There’s something of a showman’s attitude to adult video companies that makes me feel like what’s being touted is half-real, half-publicity stunt.

But there are trends that have proven prophetic: Naughty America’s belief in 3D 180-degree video over 360 seems to be mirrored by the recent Lenovo Mirage Camera, which in turn works with YouTube’s new 180-degree 3D video format. “Every once in a while we do tend to influence things, and that might be one of the places,” says Paul.

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Identity and empathy in VR: Still a project

The company’s also making its own female POV videos in VR, too, and here lies a deeper (maybe even thornier) question for adult companies looking to explore avatars going forward. Other companies have already explored the idea of videos shot from non-male heterosexual perspectives. I only tried one brief demo on a Samsung Gear VR, while standing over a small table with headphones on. It was quick, and it made me realize POV in VR changes everything.

I was mostly staring at a man’s chest hair pressed into my face as I was lying down, pinned underneath; I commented to Paul that it felt more like I was trapped. Were videos like these meant to create a sense of empathy? He nodded and admitted that topics like empathy had been brought up before — but it’s complicated. More so than I realized. 

Paul told me Naughty America was approached by a prominent university professor, who actively works with prisons (he didn’t specify what type) on correctional treatments, about the idea of exploring treating sex offenders with VR. But Paul refused.

“Despite his offer of non-disclosure, Naughty America only creates portrayals of consensual sex between adults. That is our most fundamental principle. This was too much like ‘Clockwork Orange.'”

A future of avatars (maybe)

While AR apps on phones can be impressive at first, my experience with them tends to be that they’re short-lived novelties. Is AR the new hot thing after VR for adult entertainment… or just the latest trick at a tech show full of illusions?

If the demo is any indication, it seems more like an advertisement than an immersive experience. Like a tablet-based version of the holographic dancers on the streets of “Blade Runner 2049.”

It’s not really interactive but, as Paul says, it’s an experiment. It’s not something that lives on mixed-reality smartglasses, because those don’t really exist yet.

But it’s definitely a play toward virtual avatars. “Once we create these avatars, we can use them not only in AR, but in VR situations as well,” Paul says. He refers to the recent VRChat phenomenon, saying it confirms Naughty America’s entry into that area. By creating the avatars, he says, “we can become agents for these performers in virtual worlds.”

“Maybe someday there will be a Naughty America you can walk around in in virtual space, we’ll see, but this is the beginning.”

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The post How AR blurs the line between porn and ‘adult entertainment’ first appeared on Joggingvideo.com.

Editors’ note: This story is part of our Turned On special report exploring the intersection of sex and technology. It contains sexually explicit descriptions and may not be suited for younger readers.

In the sunny living room of a Mediterranean-style house in Oakland, California, Rosalind sips coffee through a straw. The 24-year-old research assistant wears a thin green utility jacket and has large brown eyes and dark wavy hair with pin-up-girl bangs. Sitting on a couch as SLR cameras record her, she gets ready to tell nine people, none of whom she’s met in real life before, about the first time she masturbated.

“I can’t believe I told you guys about the shower masturbation,” says Rosalind (not her real name). “That’s literally the first time I have ever said that out loud.”

A few crew members chuckle. They’re filming for OMGYes, a site that hosts a series of online videos about how to sexually satisfy a woman.

OMGYes is one of a number of companies ushering sex education for the 18 and older crowd into a new era. Serving a space somewhere between the staid, impassive lectures many sat through as students and a pornography industry that values entertainment above all else, these companies use interactive and user-generated digital media to explore the more emotional, intimate and vulnerable sides of sex.

“The internet has offered, along with a lot of really disturbing images and ideas, a lot of potential for positive education,” says Peggy Orenstein, author of “Girls & Sex” and “Cinderella Ate my Daughter,” which examines how modern culture sexualizes young girls. Sites like OMGYes, Orenstein says, “have the opportunity to do an end-run around traditional sources of education — and miseducation.”

Can’t keep my hands to myself

Launched in 2015 by U.C. Berkeley graduates Lydia Daniller and Rob Perkins, OMGYes is a startup dedicated to “the science of women’s pleasure.” Its videos feature one-on-one interviews with women like Rosalind who share their sexual history and favorite techniques.

Other videos are interactive.

Viewers can, for example, use their fingers to rub and tap digital renderings of female genitalia on a touchscreen. These images are created from thousands of composited, high-definition photographs stitched together from some of OMGYes’ interviewees, who range in race, age and body type. As you touch, a voice-over softly guides you where to touch and how fast. The lessons end when the screen fades to white. If you do everything “right,” the voice lets out a satisfying sigh. If not, she suggests you stop and take a break.

Online videos have attempted to educate about sex before. In addition to the YouTube channels Sexplanations and Hannah Witton, there’s Laci Green. The 27-year-old YouTube personality has talked about sex and dating since 2008, and has over 1.5 million subscribers. But while videos by Green and others simply require passive watching, OMGYes infuses its tutorials with a level of visceral interactivity and immediacy that video blogs, books and magazines can’t offer.

Though the tutorials can be titillating, OMGYes is serious about the facts and techniques it presents. In partnership with Indiana University and The Kinsey Institute, it gathered feedback from more than 2,000 women, ages 18-95. With this information, OMGYes offers a platform for women to talk about a subject that at worst is seen as taboo, and at best, unimportant.

“Why aren’t we talking about pleasure? Like actual pleasure,” says Sybil Lockhart, lead researcher at OMGYes. “When we went to look up what the research was on pleasure, we found that there really wasn’t any. What gets funded generally is pathology. It’s anorgasmia or dryness or soreness.”

The first season of OMGYes is currently available for a $40 flat fee (about £30 or AU$50), and includes lessons about delaying and intensifying orgasms, stimulating the clitoris and communicating in the bedroom. For its 200,000 current users, OMGYes wants its upcoming second season, which doesn’t yet have a release date, to cover internal vaginal touch. It brought in Rosalind to talk about experiences including female ejaculation. 

After Rosalind wraps up her onscreen interview, the team breaks for a late lunch of Chinese takeout. Later, Rosalind will shoot her touch-and-talk scene, where she’ll masturbate on camera and narrate what works.

At the end of all this, she’ll fly back home to DC and return to her job at a university. She hopes her contributions to the project will help form a more sensible, but still joyful, narrative around sex.

“Having more resources like this gives [people] a positive interaction with the actual ins-and-outs of human sexuality, rather than the facade we see in pornography,” Rosalind says. “Fantasies are great, but demonstrate them in a way that are actually attainable.”

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Let’s make a movie 

The “facade of pornography,” and its entertaining but often unrealistic depictions of sex, motivated Cindy Gallop to find Make Love Not Porn (MLNP) in 2012. A former publicist and marketer who now heads her own consultant firm, Gallop is everything you’d expect an ad exec to be — fast-talking, blunt and charismatic. She created the site after discovering many of the men she slept with made false assumptions about what she wanted in bed.

“Porn, by default, becomes sex education, and not in a good way,” Gallop says. “But the issue is not porn. The issue is that we don’t talk about sex in the real world.” The combination of free streaming online pornography and society’s reluctance to talk openly about sex, Gallop says, results in people taking their sexual behavioral cues from pornography.

To counter this, MLNP encourages users to upload and share videos of themselves having sex or masturbating. Subscribers can rent videos for $5 (about £4 or AU$6, converted) and stream them for three weeks. MLNP has two requirements for submissions: all those involved must consent to the whole process (the recording, the submission and most importantly, the sex itself) and participants must be having the sex they’d have in real life.

One video shows a woman getting into a coughing fit while her partner rubs her back and offers a tissue. Another features an orange tabby cat jumping on the bed, indifferently watching its owners have sex and walking to the foot of the bed to lie down. There is small talk. There is silence. There are women with body hair. There are naked men wearing socks.

MLNP doesn’t consider its videos to be pornography or even amateur, and to label them as either would be a bit reductive. These videos don’t feature professional actors contractually paid to have sex. The stars are everyday people experiencing genuine sexual connections.

“It’s not performing for the camera,” says Sarah Beall, MLNP’s curator and community manager. “What we’re doing is creating a space to show that real-world sex comes in all different varieties and it isn’t less valuable, pleasurable or worthwhile.”

Other services have goals similar to MLNP. The YouTube channel Fck Yes, for example, shows how people can seek and receive sexual consent. There are only four complete episodes so far, and while the videos use explicit language, they’re relatively safe for work and don’t depict actual sex.

MLNP videos include actual sex, and that they are crowdsourced and shareable online is key to MLNP’s overall mission. Anyone with the moxie to whip out a phone and record themselves can spontaneously upload a video and share it with MLNP’s 400,000 subscribers. In the five years since the site launched, 200 users have submitted 1,500 videos.

The company likens users uploading their sexual adventures to MLNP to social media users posting their latest meal on Instagram or vacation photos on Facebook.

“We’re building a whole new category on the internet called ‘social sex,'” Gallop says. “Our competition isn’t porn. It’s Facebook and YouTube. Or it would be Facebook and YouTube if they allowed sexual expression.”

By making more down-to-earth depictions of sex as accessible as possible, Gallop hopes sex will be viewed not as something scandalous or fantastical, but as something intrinsically human. 

“Nobody ever brings us up on how to behave well in bed,” she says. “But they should. Because there is empathy, sensitivity, generosity, kindness. All those are as important [in sex] as they are in other areas of our lives where we’re actively taught to have those values.”

Love you better

Empathy, sensitivity and kindness aren’t terms usually used to describe pornography. But porn production company BaDoinkVR hopes to change that. Founded in 2006 and based in Rochester, New York, BaDoinkVR specializes in virtual reality porn.

Although the majority of its content falls into what you’d typically see on a porn site (blond, blowjob, threesome), two of its videos, “Virtual Sexology I” and “Virtual Sexology II,” aim to educate viewers about sexual positions and techniques through a first-person point of view.

Viewers are in the front seat, engaging in foreplay and having sex with an encouraging partner. Sometimes, an omniscient female voice-over gives tips, chiming in about the benefits of pelvic exercises or sex toys. During one scene, when the actress is on her back in a missionary position, the voice cuts in to remind viewers that “pulling the legs back to the chest or close to the ears can create deeper penetration, which can be uncomfortable or pleasurable depending on her body preference.”

“The porn industry’s primary objective is to entertain viewers,” says Dinorah Hernandez, a producer at BaDoinkVR and director of “Virtual Sexology II.” But porn can also be used to educate viewers, she says, adding that in the end, “Virtual Sexology” was created to “help people become better, more confident and more attentive lovers.”

BaDoinkVR isn’t exactly alone in its endeavor to educate within the industry. The video streaming service PornHub, for example, launched a sex education and sexual wellness portal in February 2016. But while the portal functions more like an info center, BaDoinkVR is creating original and engaging video content. 

Geared toward straight men, “Virtual Sexology I” has been downloaded over 50,000 times and was BaDoinkVR’s most downloaded video of 2016. For the sequel, which is about female arousal, Hernandez enlisted Holly Richmond, a psychologist who specializes in sex therapy and supervised the techniques and advice featured in the video. 

“VR will be a paradigm shifter,” Richmond says. Because of its level of immersion, it “gives us the opportunity to teach empathy, facilitate connection and feel more relational” compared to 2D content.  

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“Virtual Sexology” is still pornography, and it features attractive actors who moan, squirm and gyrate in all the right ways. But they also do things you don’t usually see in porn. 

For example, the (male) actor begins the video by looking into the camera and saying, “I know we’ve been through some hard times with our sex life, but I strongly believe that we are on the best way and path to improve.” They also go through breathing exercises and politely thank “you” after orgasming.

BaDoinkVR hopes to add installments that tackle more complex issues like fear of intimacy or erectile dysfunction.

“These are serious issues for many, and more often than not, people are either too embarrassed or too afraid to admit to them,” Hernandez says. 

Tell it like it is, and how it could be

As a porn company, BaDoinkVR benefits from its other, traditional content too, and was able to make “Virtual Sexology” free for download. But services like OMGYes and MLNP don’t have the advantage of working within a multibillion dollar industry. They face an uphill battle, as it’s difficult to get potential investors and partners to distinguish the difference between porn and more nuanced adult content.

One major operational challenge for MLNP was payment processing, due to PayPal’s policy against “sexually oriented digital goods or content delivered through a digital medium.” Email marketing service MailChimp also prohibits sexually explicit content and it took MLNP four more tries to find an email partner. You’ll also never see MLNP or OMGYes in the Apple App Store or Google Play because of strict rules against sexual content.

With such operational roadblocks, it’s hard for companies to get sexually explicit but educational services off the ground. As such, there’s less choice and variety for people looking to learn about sexual behavior, intimacy and well-being. Not only can this be a detriment to individual consumers, but, some would argue, to society as a whole.

“We live in a media culture that is absolutely saturated in sexuality,” Orenstein says. “But we’re utterly silent about what healthy sexual behavior ought to be. That is the real bizarre discontinuity with our culture right now.”

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Using your penis as your password isn’t new (you can already do it on an iPhone), but one porn site wants to make it standard practice for members. 

On Thursday, live-cam site CamSoda launched “Dick-ometrics,” a stand-up new way to log in to your account. (CamSoda assured us this is not a belated April Fools’ joke.) 

CamSoda has a history of racy stunts: It recently offered to pay for your internet if you streamed your life 24 hours a day, in clothes or out of them. In the case of “Dick-ometrics,” pants aren’t optional, but perhaps surprisingly given the software’s name, it doesn’t measure your size, or track your stamina or how long you’re on the site. Instead, Dick-ometrics is just a fancy new way of saying “lets you log in with your penis.”

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But why drop trou to sign in? According to CamSoda, your penis print is as unique as a fingerprint or retina scan. Naturally (and purely in the vein of security), we had some questions about safety and sharing (and who has to look at all those dick pics, poor soul?), so we asked CamSoda Vice President Darren Press via email just how safe your man bits are.

Where are the dick pics stored on CamSoda’s servers? How do we know this isn’t some massive database waiting to be breached? 

The pictures are encrypted. Our team has worked tirelessly to ensure Dick-ometrics is satisfactory and completely safe. We understand people’s sensitivities and would never do anything to jeopardize their confidentiality. 

Dick-ometrics is being introduced to help ensure their confidentiality, not the other way around. The original picture someone takes is used to create a hashed datastore, but is never kept in an image format. Once we have the attributes of the user’s penis, we are able to authenticate it.

What is CamSoda’s penis recognizing software? How many penises did CamSoda have to run through to get it to work? 

CamSoda’s penis recognition technology (PRT) was developed in-house. We also contracted out to a firm specializing in biometrics to help refine the technology and get it as accurate as possible. 

Right now it identifies penises with a confidence of about 76 percent. The goal is to get it above 95 percent. The differences in the penile state, however, make this more difficult. Girth, length, curve, vascularity are all affected by the level of arousal.  At the moment, we are focusing on erect penises as our go-to for login.

How does it know the biometrics are secure? What if I just held up a photo of another man’s dick?

Our PRT recognizes any penis — you can use another man’s. But that wouldn’t be recommended as it’s not that secure. At least one other person, the owner of that penis, would have the ability to access your accounts and potentially millions if it’s an adult entertainment star’s penis. So, in short, for secure access, use your own damn penis. It’s secure.

So next time you want to send an unsolicited dick pic, just use it to log in to your porn instead. 

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The future of sex could be pretty interactive, but it’s starting with men.

Top porn streaming company Pornhub announced a new channel of interactive videos that will work with the latest generation of connected male sex toys. The videos, according Pornhub, will work with the Fleshlight Launch and Kiiroo Onyx, featuring “an eclectic mix of content, offering an assortment of themes and appealing to various target audiences.”

Sex toys and content geared to women are arriving later on, working with OhMiBod, We-Vibe, Lovense Lush and Kiiroo Pearl, but Pornhub didn’t confirm when.

The new interactive channel will also work with VR eventually, combining the synced content with immersive video. 

Corey Price, VP of Pornhub, answered some of our questions below. Responses have been edited for clarity (and modesty).

Q: Does each video get programmed to work with connected sex toys? Or do videos automatically work?Price: Videos have been specially programmed to work with connected sex toys. We have a data layer overlaid on the video that sends synchronized pulses that mimic tactile sensations from [the body] that are transmitted to a user’s synced wireless interactive sex toy. Hand motions would also be replicated.

How do videos end up syncing with the toys? Is it via video or sound, or is it specifically programmed for each piece of content?There is a pairing process during which the player needs to connect to the user’s sex toy via an Android or iOS app. Once the video starts playing, the pulses from the toy will replicate what is happening on the screen of their PC or mobile device.

Will sensations vary based on the action, or is it more about rhythm/speed?They will be based upon the action. If the video content is depicting a fast action scene, the rhythm/speed will intensify. For slower scenes, that draw out the excitement and build it up through the duration of the scene, the rhythm and speeds slow down and work in tandem with the content being broadcasted.

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Old Nokia phones double as adult toys, says survey

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Why invest in an expensive vibrator when you might have one sitting on your pile of old gadgets?

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Because of their strong vibration function, old Nokia “dumb” phones are getting new life as vibrators, according to a survey on female masturbation in India.

One hundred woman responded to the poll by Agents of Ishq, a project focused on sex, love and desire in India. And they had some surprising answers about how they achieve maximum satisfaction.

“The old Nokia vibrating phone made several appearances on this survey,” Agents of Ishq wrote earlier this month in a post about the survey, which was originally brought to our attention by Vocativ. “We have no idea why that company is not the market leader after this.”

While a survey of just 100 women hardly suggests old Nokia phones are going to show up in sex shops anytime soon, it’s nonetheless, well, buzz-worthy that women are getting smart about dumb phones.

Nokia did not respond immediately to a request for a comment regarding the secret sensual lives of its phones.

While using a phone’s vibrate function for sexual gratification might sound bizarre, keep in mind that sex toys like vibrators aren’t as readily available to women in some countries as they are in others.

Nokia phones aren’t the only products to offer sexual satisfaction. According to the Homemade Sex Toys website, there are ways to use any cell phone as a vibrator.

The best option seems to be the alarm method. Just program your alarm to go off every minute on vibrate for as long as you think you’ll need to get the job done.

The website suggests keeping your old cell phone when you upgrade to a new one. That way you can have a device just for your sexy-time needs.

“Having a sex-only cell phone vibrator also means you can keep your everyday cell phone pristine,” Homemade Sex Toys website suggests. “You won’t have to worry that it smells funky, or feel weird if you let a friend talk on it.”

And a bonus for those who care about the environment: by using your old cell phone as a vibrator instead of throwing it in a trash bin headed for the landfill, you’ll help save the environment one orgasm at a time.

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A sex-tracking condom ring is coming

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The i.Con Smart Condom, which markets itself as the “world’s first smart condom,” is actually a ring that fits over a boring, dumb condom and claims to track the exercise of your man bits, as well as detect chlamydia and syphilis.

The ring, first announced last July, is currently available for preorder on British Condoms for £59.99 (about $74, AU$97) with an unknown release date. But you can’t actually put a ring on it yet — the company says it won’t take your money until the product has a firm release.

In short, the i.Con ring promises to answer every burning question you’ve ever had about your sex session. Don’t worry, it will pair with an app for all your data visualization needs.

According to the preorder page, the ring will answer questions such as:

• What’s my thrust velocity?
• How fast are my thrusts?
• How many calories did that sesh just burn?
• How many times did I just have sex?
• What’s the average skin temperature of my… eggplant?
• What’s my girth?
• How many different positions did I just conquer?

Plus, it aims to answer that age-old question: How do I stack up at sex to everyone else around the world? Because sure, let’s gamify sex. What could go wrong?

The ring, which will come with a one-year warranty, will have a Micro-USB charging port to provide six to eight hours of “live” usage (not clear if this means thrust usage or something else). It will work with a combination of “nano-chip and sensors,” and pair with your device via Bluetooth. (I thought it would charge kinetically, but maybe that’s just a pipe dream.)

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With zero pictures of the self-styled “future of wearable technology in the bedroom” on the site, it’s hard to say just how all this technology will fit into a tiny ring. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment. British Condoms does say the i.Con will be available in one size with a “band adjustment feature.”

Worried about privacy, the data kind? British Condoms says “all data will be kept anonymous, but users will have the option to share their recent data with friends, or, indeed the world.”

Forget dick pics. Now we have to worry about dick status updates.

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Batteries Not Included: The CNET team shares experiences that remind us why tech stuff is cool.

The post Smart condom ring i.Con is like a Fitbit for your man bits first appeared on Joggingvideo.com.