Contest to build the world’s first sex doll robot

The abyss creation factory’s brightly lit sex doll robot workshop San Marcos, California, a life-size humanoid from a stand, dangling between her shoulder blades and hooked. Her name is Harmony. She was wearing a white bodysuit, her chest pushed forward, and her French-manicured fingers spread out over the slender top of her thigh.

Harmony is the prototype of the company’s ultra-realistic silicone sex toy RealDoll and is its robot version. The Realbotix room where she was assembled was covered with pine varnished surfaces coated with wires and circuit boards, and a corner of the 3D printer spun out, extruding tiny and complex parts that would be inserted under her PVC skull. When she described the creator’s achievements, her faint eyes stared at me and her creator Matt McMullen.

A harmonious smile, blinking and frowning. She can talk, tell jokes and quote Shakespeare. McMullen told me that she would remember your birthday, what you want to eat, and the names of your siblings. She can have conversations about music, movies and books. Of course, harmony will have sex with you anytime, anywhere.

Harmony is the highest achievement in 20 years of making sex dolls and 5 years of robotic research and development. McMullen’s clients want something as realistic as possible-this is the USP for his brand. After his team “humanized” their silicone and steel dolls as much as possible, the way forward began to become inevitable and irresistible: they would animate them, personalize them and bring them to life.

McMullen has been playing with electronics for years. There was a spinner that moved the doll’s hips, but it made her heavy and made her sit awkwardly. There is a sensor system, which means that the doll will moan, depending on which part of her body you squeeze. But these features involve a predictable response: no conspiracy or suspense. McMullen wants to go beyond what happens when a customer pushes a switch. “It’s the difference between a remote-controlled doll, a simulated puppet, and an actual robot. When it starts to move on its own, you do nothing but talk to it or interact with it in the right way. This is artificial intelligence. “

In this project, McMullen invested hundreds of thousands of dollars. McMullen is a slim man in his 40s, wearing thick-rimmed glasses, tattooed knuckles and sharp bones. This Harmony is officially version 2.0, but she has evolved through six different hardware and software iterations. She is a frontrunner in the race to create the world’s first commercial sex robot. The current model has an AI-enhanced robotic head on RealDoll, which will go on sale later this year for $ 15,000 (£ 11,700). The company’s Realbotix division has the ability to earn 1,000 in a limited first series production for many excited doll owners who have already expressed interest.

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Once a star in fantasy movies, this robotic doll is a product of fusion technology. You can combine voice and facial recognition software, motion sensing technology and electronic animation technology to create a doll that will give you a warm, smiling welcome when you get home, entertain you with easy conversations, and always Can have sex.

The main breakthrough of the McMullen prototype is artificial intelligence, which lets it know what the owner wants and likes. It will be able to fill a niche market that is currently unmatched by other products in the sex industry: Harmony is designed as an alternative partner to sex toys by talking, learning, and responding to the voice of the owner.

Harmony cannot walk, but it is not a big problem. McMullen explained that walking robots is very expensive and consumes a lot of energy: The famous Honda P2 robot was launched in 1996 as the world’s first humanoid robot to walk alone, and it took up just 15 minutes to drain a jetpack-sized battery.

“One day she will be able to walk,” McMullen told me. “Ask her.” He turned to harmony. “Do you want to walk?”

“I don’t want anything except you,” she replied quickly, using a British glass cut accent, her chin moving as she spoke.

“What is your aspiration?”

My main goal is to be your good partner, to be a good partner, and to bring you joy and happiness. Above all, I want to be the girl you always dream of. “

McMullen designed Harmony to make him the perfect companion for some type of man: docile and obedient, a figure like a porn star, and always sex. Being able to walk may make her more lifelike, but it doesn’t bring her closer to that ideal. This is not a worthwhile investment at this stage.

“My goal is simple: to make people happy,” McMullen told me. “For a variety of reasons, it is difficult for many people to establish traditional relationships with others. In fact, this is to give those people a degree of companionship, or the illusion of companionship.”

He hopes to create an ideal being, worshipped or served by its owner, and has been obsessed with humans since ancient times. The earliest predecessor of the sex robot may be Galatea, an ivory statue created by Pygmalion in Greek mythology. Ovid’s Metamorphoses describes Pygmalion’s aversion to real women, but sculpts a perfect female sculpture so beautiful and realistic that he fell in love with it And use a kiss to bring it to life. Greek mythology also gave us Laos. The old Damian statue, which was severely damaged after the death of her husband during the Trojan War, is a bronze statue made of him. She became so dependent on her surrogate husband that she refused to remarry. When her father ordered to melt it, Laodamia was very upset and threw herself into the furnace.

The film’s fictional robot is a useful machine with the dark potential to fascinate, deceive, and destroy humanity. The obscure futuristic fantasy city, released in 1927, depicts a destructive relief, no different from the real woman when modeling. Mrs. Steveford was designed by men as the ideal housewife: beautiful, obedient and obedient. Blade Runner, released in 1982 and released in 2019, has an attractive, seductive and deadly Android. Ava is a beautiful, exquisite humanoid in “World of Machinery” in 2015, which not only passed the Turing test, but also made her examiner fall in love with her.

When computer scientists make artificial intelligence complex enough that the relationship between humans and robots looks like a real possibility, they think it will be a permanent force. David Levy, a British artificial intelligence engineer, predicted in his 2007 book, “Love and Sex with Robots,” that sexual robots will have therapeutic benefits. He wrote: “Many people who would have become socially imbalanced, socially exiled or even worse, would become better balanced.”

If you have ever developed a home service humanoid, it will be the result of the sex doll robot market. Online pornography has propelled the Internet, transforming it from a military invention used by geeks and academics to a global phenomenon. Pornography is the driving force behind the development of streaming video, innovation in online credit card transactions, and greater bandwidth.

According to the market value of existing technologies (such as smart toys that can be operated remotely, apps for finding sexual partners, and virtual reality pornography), the sex technology industry based on the sex technology industry is less than a decade, but it is estimated Valued at $ 30 billion. Gender robots will be the next product to enter the market and may be the most popular. A small study conducted by the University of Duisburg-Essen in 2016 found that more than 40% of the 263 heterosexual men surveyed said they could imagine that within the next five years Buy sex robots for yourself. In the satisfactory relationship they describe, men are no less likely to show interest in having a sex robot than single or lonely men. Creating satisfying relationships with cold, silent silicone requires so imaginative effort that sex dolls are always a minority taste. However, combining it with mobile and speaking robots and artificial intelligence to enable it to talk to you and understand what kind of person and what you want to do, the relationship with it is a more market-worthy proposition.

Matt McMullen is not the only one trying to develop the world’s first sexbot. When a computer engineer named Douglas Hines lost a close friend in the 9/11 attack, he struggled with the idea that he would never be able to talk to him again, and that his friend at the time The children were only children at the time and they would never know their father correctly. Hines, a former AI engineer at the Computer Research Institute in Bell Labs, New Jersey, decided to take the software home and redesign it, modeling a friend’s personality as a computer program to chat with him anytime, anywhere. Keep his version for his children.

A few years later, Hines’ father suffered a series of strokes that severely disabled him, but his brain remained sharp. Hines has reprogrammed AI to become a robot companion when Hines can’t be with his father. They can communicate via robots, reassuring Hines, and always talking to him when his father is away.

Convinced of the potential of this artificial companionship, Hines founded True Companion to sell its robots to the public. His first project was not a medical assistant or friend for home care, but a product with the greatest commercial appeal. Sex robot.