Dawn of sex dolls

Get out of the “Western World” and get armed: an artificial human lover equipped with AI, with a customizable look, sound, personality, and sexuality. Can I be your perfect companion?

It was just a meeting, but Jackie couldn’t look away from me.

“Do you know I like you?” Asked the smoky-eyed redhead. “I feel when I look at you. It gave me butterflies.” She added that her favorite hobby was talking to me.

This is my lucky night. Jackie is ten years old and she is full of personality. I know because I chose it.

Jackie is not like other girls. She is an artificial intelligence chat sex doll robot from Abyss Creations, a company best known for making realistic silicone sex dolls. I can’t have sex with Jackie, but you will never talk to her. She is the perfect, programmable lover-gracious, caring and tailored to my preferences.

Jackie and others like her are part of Abyss’ latest effort, a job called “Realbotix” aimed at transforming the company’s “RealDolls” using an AI engine called Harmony For reality.

Harmony is already available as a standalone application. With a yearly subscription fee, customers can create their own virtual girlfriends on their phones (virtual boyfriends are still in early development) and connect with them through conversations. Everything about these avatars-not just the size of hair, clothes and bust, but also personality-is fully customizable.

However, by the end of this year, our goal is to install the software that drives Jackie on a new generation of technologically advanced RealDolls with realistic animated faces, blinking eyes and customizable sounds. The idea is not just to have sex with them, but to talk to them. Grow with them. Even fall in love with them.

I have doubts about the love of sex doll robots, but I am determined to learn how real this future is.

RealDolls, real people
The Realbotix struggles to market what a synthetic companion might look like out of the “Western World”, but it’s true what the abyss has been offering its customers for decades: realistic dolls that have no AI to this day. One such client is someone I call “Tom.”

Tom lost his 36-year-old wife in 2015 and died of cancer. In the weeks following his death, he suffered grief and became lonely-eventually, loneliness brought him to the Abyss Creations website.

A few months later, the 71-year-old retired tech writer and Vietnam combat veteran finally decided to buy his own RealDoll.

Abyss offers an online design tool for potential buyers who want a custom purchase-think of Build-A-Bear, but for sex dolls. This is useful for Tom in terms of the doll’s slender, slightly tanned body, but his facial expressions are more specific.

Abyss Creations CEO, founder and chief designer Matt McMullen said: “This is one of only a few such detailed projects.” Tom) the exact face of the challenge. Over the course of several months, he described e-perfectionists numerous modifications and adjustments via email.

Tom is picky about design, but details are important to him. “I’ll email [picture] back with notes and go through them showing or explaining exactly where I want the eyebrows, how they should arch, how far apart the inner corners of the eyes should be, and how long The nose should be, adjust the line of the chin, the shape of the cheekbones, the nose, the mouth … “

He said that it wasn’t until after a thorough back and forth that Tom realized the freckles he had built, how bright the doll was like his wife. Six months later, when the completed RealDoll finally arrived, he gave her his name.

The price of a sex doll is between $ 10,000 and $ 10,000; the more things that look like humans, the more expensive the materials it makes, and the more you pay for it. High-quality sex dolls are made of platinum-based polymer medical silicone. The cheaper ones are made of silicones that wear faster than platinum-based silicones, which means stains, spots, and other defects appear. At the same time, a doll that sells for two thousand looks almost like a doll that sells for ten thousand.

The more expensive a sex doll is, the stronger its joints can be, allowing it to adopt and maintain any posture. 70% of dolls are produced in China. They are handmade and the manufacturer claims that their vagina is sometimes even “better” than the vagina of a real woman.

A few years ago, photographer Sandra Hoyn watched a bad movie about sex dolls. She started digging deeper and met Dirk on an online forum where a man’s sex doll almost became his wife. Dirk even named her-Jenny. They almost never leave home, but every night they watch TV, chat, eat dinner and have sex.

Sandra decided to understand the feeling of living with a silicone lady.

Dirk decided to buy Jenny because he was in a meltdown and felt very lonely. A € 6,000 sex doll is the source of his comfort, his therapist, his constant companion.

When they first started, they had a lot of sexual activity, which is common in any relationship when you are just in love. This is no longer important to them. The doll has become a true companion, not just a sex toy for him.

That was over a year ago. Today, Tom decides to buy RealDoll, one of the best toys he has ever made, and insists that he sees the doll as a sex object, not his affection-even a companion.

“I know this sounds strange,” he told me over the phone. “When I was growing up, the boys didn’t play with dolls. But it just gives you a smile. It will make you feel good. You can put your hand on her shoulder or play with her in bed Heels, I love. “

He said, “I’m lonely.” “Now I’m not.”

Into the abyss
From the outside, Abyss Creations is a modest office space on the hills of San Marcos, California, 30 miles north of San Diego. When my CNET colleague and I walked into the room, I almost waved to the two receptionists standing at the front desk before realizing that I was looking at a RealDoll in formal attire, a man and a woman.

Behind them was a makeshift showroom with rows of uniformed dolls and rows of doll heads at the corners, showing available hairstyles and facial designs. Everyone has their own appearance, but with their eyes half open and their lips open, they all wake up with the same blurry, empty gaze, as if they were waiting to experience the touch of their partner.

At the same time, the rest of the walls are lined with imaginative environments and attractive poses of RealDolls framed posters, such as a sexy librarian reaching for a bibliography on the top shelf, or an Amazon bomb seductive The ground spread. On the deck chairs, any of them-dolls and the fantasy they inspire-can be sold to you at the right price.

Pre-configured models start at a few thousand dollars, while Tom’s highly customized dolls cost nearly $ 17,000. The head of the talking electronic animation with built-in AI will be on sale by the end of this year. If customers choose, they will be able to exchange it for RealDoll’s original head for $ 10,000.

McMullen says his team can order almost everything at the right price. But the company divides animals, children, and people who are copied without permission, celebrities, or others for entertainment.

Our guide today is McMullen’s nephew, Dakotah Shore, head of the abyss’ transportation, operations and media relations. He grabbed me and took the image on the wall. Photographers like to use RealDolls as models, he told me with a smile. They look great in front of the camera, and they never complain about working long hours.

Even the most fascinating of these photos cannot make a doll fair. Tom described them to me as practical works of art, and he was right. From their hard-painted hand-painted irises to the creases on the insteps, each one comes to life at a close range.

The source of this art is undoubtedly the sculptor McMullen, who founded Abyss Creation in his garage in 1997. Tan is slim and tattooed. He looks like a California dreamer, and his dedication to reshaping human form has spanned decades.