About the recent festivities of Valentine’s Day, let’s talk about love and friendship, a very relevant issue in our human lives. It never ceases to amaze us how today technologies influence so much our ways of falling in love, having sex, looking for friendships and matching with other people.
Finding love, friendship or sex are now just a click away and is becoming more naturalized each time. Dating applications and social networks are playing a fundamental role in social behavior.
There is a before and after of the pandemic in terms of ways of relating. The confinement due to Covid-19 prompted people to experiment even more with online games, dating through video calls and, of course, experiencing virtual love, family gatherings and work meetings. However, the social distancing showed us that there are still unexplored opportunities for technologies focused on relationships and how to create more meaningful virtual connections.
Possibly in a few years the normal will be "love is in the metaverse": love will have already been transferred to the network and virtual reality. And it is that, at present, immersive technologies and the sex-tech industry already exists.
As connectivity and graphic processing progresses with solutions as 5G, along with a greater supply of hardware and software, there will be a more widespread adoption of virtual reality.
For example, there is already an immersive virtual reality and it is said that spending time with another person in virtual reality could become an experience as pleasant as it is in person. But the interesting thing is that with a truly immersive virtual reality (which is what the metaverse promises) you can hear the voice of a person in 360° audio and motion sensors lets you feel the presence of the person as if they were in the same room.
In this fashion, the development of haptic technology will play a very important role in expanding the possibilities of interacting and building emotionally closer virtual relationships that will feel more and more real every day.
In the future, the development of haptic interfaces will focus on suits with built-in sensors that will provide a digital touch feeling when you hug or hold hands with someone else's avatar on the metaverse.
As examples, there are already teledildonics, sex toys that can be controlled remotely through the internet or bluetooth and that a couple can control. During isolation, these devices became very popular, because they allow couples to explore their sexuality in a much safer, private and real-time environment. Although this trend has its origins in the 90s, these devices have been evolving rapidly to modernize sexual pleasure experiences.
As an example, we have the Handy which is a sex toy for men that can be controlled remotely with a smartphone or a computer and take advantage of synchronized virtual reality to imitate the movement that occurs on the screen, providing a more pleasant and immersive feeling at a long distance.
As an example, we have the Handy which is a sex toy for men that can be controlled remotely with a smartphone or a computer and take advantage of synchronized virtual reality to imitate the movement that occurs on the screen, providing a more pleasant and immersive feeling at a long distance.
Once technology reaches maturity and the adoption of these new languages of love grows, the experiences shared in virtual worlds will be more intimate and deep, as well as perhaps increasingly normal; although this in turn brings new ethical dilemmas.
What there is no doubt is that virtual reality and metaverse can already begin to be named as the new normal for romance, friendship and sex.
