No matter how beautiful the sex animations are in your favorite virtual playground, they can't compete with the movement of your own body.
How soon will we be slipping gracefully into motion-capture suits or using 3-D cameras to capture those uniquely natural moves and engage our entire bodies in online sexual adventures, rather than limping along with keyboard and mouse? Sooner than you might think.
Kevin Alderman, who's already infamous for the sex animations his company Strokerz Toyz creates for Second Life, is developing a wireless, consumer-level motion-capture suit that's expected to hit shelves in 2009.
"Right now only a dozen or so sites on the web offer downloadable mocap files," Alderman says. "You have to wait until some studio becomes benevolent enough to make the animations you want, or you have to engage them for your specific needs."
Personal motion-capture suits will enable residents to contribute sex animations to the world of their choice -- and to develop scenarios tailored to their own deepest desires, especially if they team up with others who also have the suits. It's the bridge between today's expensive studio mocap and the real-time avatar control of tomorrow.
Meanwhile, technologists Mitch Kapor and Philippe Bossut have developed a less exotic, yet more familiar, prototype for hands-free interaction in virtual worlds: They're using a 3-D camera to track body movements, which are in turn translated and used to control avatars in Second Life.
These new technologies won't instantly set off the "ZOMG it's sex!" media alarms the way Bluetooth-to-sex-toy interfaces do. These developers can position themselves as facilitators of dancing and flying and walking around, creators of new input devices rather than instigators of a whole new level of cybersex.
But you can be sure we'll adapt whatever they come up with to our own erotic purposes. I would gladly put up with a few technical glitches for the chance to play with home mocap systems and virtual worlds.
Traditionally, home motion-capture animation has been financially out of reach for most geeks, costing about a half-million dollars for a studio setup -- a big room, multiple cameras to capture all the angles, the spandex suit with the white pingpong balls, the software that calculates the movement of those points through space and maps it to a digital figure.
However, Rick Hall, production director at the Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, sees "a trend to move away from big external optical systems" like the mocap setups used for movies and game development. Hall suggests that MMORGs will most likely provide the first venues for real-time mocap.
"Picture the more sedate scenes like in a bar, or dance clubs," he says. "That could be an interesting application, putting on a little virtual-reality mocap suit and dancing."
Ask hard-core game developers about the limitations of using real-time motion capture devices to control your avatar and they'll remind you that your living room is a finite space. Even if you could strap on the motion sensors and use your body to maneuver your digital alter ego, you can't do much flying, climbing or fighting without hitting a wall.
"You can swing a baseball bat or kick a football, but you can't go dive, can't run, can't explore a cave," Hall says. "We're always going to have this problem. Duplicating the Holodeck on the Enterprise sounds nice, but when they turn the screen off, it's just a big room.... It's not limited by (mocap) technology but by the walls in your house."
With virtual sex, that's not such a problem. Sometimes what you want to do in a virtual world takes up no more physical space than a sleeping bag. And sometimes you actually need a wall. Where else would you secure the tie-downs?
"I'm not sure I want to go there," Hall says. (That's OK. Everybody has a day job.)
Strokerz Toyz's Alderman wants to go all the way there. While the world waits for his $10,000 home mocap suit, he's launching a mocap studio, StroCap, that focuses on mature content.
"We are soliciting (Second Life) residents to tell us what they want to see in adult motion capture," Alderman says. "More realistic caresses? More erotic dances? More action?"
With StroCap's offerings and the inevitable use of home mocap suits and 3-D cams to control avatars, people who want to express themselves sexually in a virtual world -- but can't draw or animate -- will still be able to translate their own desires and preferences into in-world animations.
Gradually, our avatars will begin to mirror the way our bodies actually move, which could have an interesting effect on the gender play virtual worlds are so keen on. If we get it right, we'll become at least 50 percent more attractive to other residents, according to a collaborative study conducted last year at Texas A&M University and New York University.
People are more than ready to replace keyboards and controllers with more holistic interfaces. Look at the demand for Wii Fit, even though nothing prevents us from popping in an exercise video or walking the dog.
As for the lag that can still be a problem in virtual worlds, well, you wouldn't have expected people to use webcams night after night over their 14,400-baud modems, and yet we did, somehow.
My first real-time mocap action will be to kiss whoever develops the system I use.
See you in a fortnight,
Regina Lynn
- - -
Regina Lynn invites you to move her at reginalynn.com.
1941: British destroyers capture a German submarine, U-110, south of Iceland. The British remove a naval version of the highly secret cipher machine known to the Allies as Enigma, and then they let the boat sink -- to keep the fact of their boarding secret.
The Enigma machine, used by the Kriegsmarine to encode and decode messages passing between shore command and ships at sea, was taken to Bletchley Park in England, where cryptographers including computer pioneer Alan Turing succeeded in breaking the naval code. The Germans, assuming U-110 had foundered with her secrets intact, failed to realize that their code was broken. The subsequent information passing before British eyes helped the Allies enormously in the Battle of the Atlantic.
Several versions of the Enigma machine existed, but the working principle -- a rotor system activated using a keyboard -- was the same. The machine itself had been around since the early 1920s and was used by other nations, too, although it is most closely associated with Nazi Germany.
The Enigma used by the German army was decrypted as early as 1932 by Polish cryptographers, who later passed their methodology along to the British and French. In light of subsequent events (the Germans drove a Franco-British expeditionary force out of Norway and then crushed the French in a six-week campaign in 1940), the military value of this early intelligence is debatable.
But breaking the German naval code, made possible in large part by the recovery of U-110's machine, provided the British with a leg up at a time when the war at sea was very much in doubt.
The capture of a U-boat on the high seas was a rare and considerable achievement, since submarine crews scuttled their boats rather than let them fall into enemy hands. In this case, the U-boat’s commander, Kapitänleutnant Fritz Julius Lemp, thinking he was going to be rammed by an oncoming destroyer, ordered his crew to abandon ship. (His precise order, according to one survivor, was "Last stop. Everybody off.") Seeing the Germans leaving the boat, the British commander managed to veer away and avoid a collision.
Lemp, already in the water when he realized his boat wasn't going to be rammed, was swimming back to U-110 to scuttle her when he was either shot by the British (according to the Germans) or simply disappeared (according to the British).
Three other U-boats were captured at sea during the war, most notably the U-505, surprised by an American task force off the African coast in June 1944. That boat is on permanent display at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.
Pop culture footnote: The thoroughly mediocre movie, U-571, was loosely based -- very loosely based -- on the capture of U-110. It was also shot through with historical inaccuracies, but that's a subject for another time and place.
(Source: Uboat.net, Wikipedia)
Scientists at the national museum of New Zealand, Te Papa, have recently completed dissections of several enormous squids, including pieces of a colossal squid -- the largest invertebrate ever caught. The female specimen weighs more than 1,000 pounds and measures 26 feet long.
The squid's resemblance to fiction's monsters of the deep, including its dinner-plate-size eyes, has attracted global interest. Scientists now believe the cephalopods can grow even larger, to more than 45 feet long, with a corresponding increase in weight.
In this gallery, we take you into the gritty, visceral business of defrosting and preserving this Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni, known in English as the colossal squid.
Left: Researchers at Te Papa had to custom-build a tank in which they could defrost the enormous squid -- and preserve it in formaldehyde.
The colossal squid is not to be confused with the giant squid, which is longer but less massive. The colossal squid pictured is almost twice as heavy as the largest giant squid discovered.
An international team of scientists was flown to New Zealand to assist in the examination of this unique find.
: Courtesy Te Papa MuseumThe squid was accidentally caught in the Ross Sea off the coast of Antarctica by fishermen searching for Chilean sea bass. The ship's captain, John Bennett, was understandably excited.
"Being alongside a creature like this is just awesome," he told Newsweek. "It's easy to see why outlandish stories about them get stretched out."
After its capture, seen here, the squid was blast-frozen aboard Bennett's boat to keep it from rotting. While necessary, it created a headache for scientists who spent days figuring out how to defrost what they call "the squidcicle."
: Courtesy Te Papa MuseumScientists didn't perform a full dissection of the new colossal squid, but they did cut up two other specimens while the largest squid was defrosting.
At left is a smaller colossal squid, which is only a partial specimen -- it was damaged in transit. Still, even the partial specimen is a boon for researchers. Only 10 of this type of squid have ever been found.
: Courtesy Te Papa MuseumThe researchers also dissected a giant squid, a cousin of the colossal variety. The giant squid is often longer than the colossal squid but significantly lighter.
: Courtesy Te Papa MuseumThe colossal squid lives on a diet of fish, caught at depths below 6,000 feet. The squid's arm tentacles, which it uses to catch and hold prey, are lined with dozens of powerful, clawed hooks.
: Courtesy Te Papa MuseumHere we see the colossal squid's beak.
Squid bodies are rarely found, but squid beaks turn up in the stomachs of marine predators like sperm whales. They providing much-needed data about the size of this elusive animal because the size of the beak corresponds to the overall size of the animal.
This specimen's lower rostral beak is only 1.7 inches across, considerably smaller than the largest found in a sperm whale stomach, suggesting that much larger colossal squid exist.
: Courtesy Te Papa MuseumThe colossal squid's eye measures 10.6 inches across -- the largest eye in the animal kingdom. Scientists believe the squid is an almost entirely visual predator and needs the huge eye to spot prey in the dark depths of Antarctic waters.
: Courtesy Te Papa MuseumThe squid's eye was well-preserved. Here, the single lens of the creature is presented in two halves. In a living squid, the larger piece of tissue drapes over the smaller one to form a single lens.
"When this squid was alive, the lens was almost certainly spherical and possibly of a size similar to an orange," professor Eric Warrant explained on the dissection team's blog.
But scientists don't know much about the animal's eye yet because, as an expert told USA Today, "This is the only intact eye (of a colossal squid) that's ever been found."
: Courtesy Te Papa MuseumIn this shot of the viscera of the smaller colossal squid, we can see its striped gills and orange ovaries, which can hold thousands of tiny white eggs.
: Courtesy Te Papa MuseumThe record-breaking colossal squid specimen is nearly thawed in this picture. The plastic bags are serving as floaties for the squid's delicate arms so that they don't break before defrosting.
After three more weeks immersed in a formaldehyde-based solution, the colossal squid will be moved to a special tank at the Te Papa museum for permanent display.