And I’ve actually been thinking that the sex toy industry has a good deal to learn from the cell phone industry lately. Sex toys are almost always output-only devices, they vibrate and squirm, and maybe even thrust or warm or squirt, but is that all there is to sex? Don’t we also want the opportunity for introspection and learning in pursuit of more and better pleasure?

Imagine if we could roll an iPhone up into a cylinder and use it as a vibrator. How much could we learn about ourselves? It’s got accelerometers and gyroscopes to track how we move it, it’s got hundreds of thousands of little capacitance sensors to track how and where we’re touching it (and which I suspect could be adapted to monitor wetness as well), it’s got a camera for capturing even more data about how it’s positioned relative to our body (and maybe for making a show of it if we’re the exhibitionist type). And that’s just the equipment that it comes with by coincidence, having never been meant as a sex toy; add a couple of cheap LEDs and the camera could do pulse oximetry to track our heart rate and genital blood flow, add a resistive touch layer and we could cross check the capacitive layer and track pressure when we squeeze. And that’s not even getting into the more advanced haptic technologies that seem to be coming in the near future.

Tie all those sensors together with the right software, and we’ve got a sex toy that can adapt itself to us, and that can keep track of our actions and reactions when we’re not in the right state of mind to keep track ourselves if we’re doing it right. Like, if we’re looking to tease ourselves or our partner, we might set it to watch for signs of nearing release and crank down the vibrations to hold us on the edge for longer. Or if we’re playing with ourselves while looking at something sexy online, we could link our vibrator to our computer/phone/tablet via Bluetooth, and when we’re done we’d have a story with all of the hottest parts automatically highlighted according to our real time reactions (ditto for pictures or video).

And, if we chose to submit anonymized feedback to the makers of those stories/pictures/videos/etc, imagine what it could do for the world of porn. Having a nice big data set of feedback directly from your users’ throbbing genitals telling you exactly what they all found arousing would have to make it easier to find and address niche markets with their own tastes and desires, while simultaneously guiding the mainstream market in a shift closer to what their potential customers really find hot.

And of course, there’s no reason the data has to be anonymized before sharing if the we the users don’t want it to be. The exhibitionists could get a leave-in magic bullet model and have it tweet their arousal in real time if they felt like it, or play any number of other fun games at the intersection of their legs and social networking. And couples could work to get over awkwardness and embarrassment in learning each other’s favorite ways to get off by sharing their logs with each other and experimenting with what they find.

I have to wonder why this sort of thing doesn’t already exist. There are a few awkward novelty “teledildonics” devices, but no real attempt at mainstream penetration. Is it just a matter of the technologies being relatively new and expensive? Has it really not occurred to anyone to apply them this way yet? Or is it more of a social issue? Maybe it’s something as simple as the old women and technology don’t mix meme? Or could it be there really isn’t much demand for this sort of thing; perhaps curiosity is overwhelmed by some sort of fear of exposure in sexual matters like this in the population at large? I just don’t know…