Large Fierce Mammal

This is an "old tech" remote control vibrator. Nokia's patent application may take sex toy tech into a brave new world.

Let’s go back to that simpler time in the last century, when the internet was in its infancy, e-mail and ICQ were the go to cutting edge communications methods, cellular phones were simply that – phones, and a computer was just a computer. Moving forward from that time, the line has blurred so that hand held devices like phones, tablets, and netbooks now perform a lot of the same functions to the point where, depending on the user’s needs and lifestyle, they’re essentially interchangeable. The trend is obvious – the tools are evolving to integrate a user’s electronic communications needs into a single, highly mobile instrument.

And now, this concept has taken a step further with the announcement that, last September, cellular phone manufacturer Nokia, “… issued a patent for a material that could be attached to human skin and would vibrate to alert the wearer of an incoming call or text message,” for the purpose of creating, “… a material attachable to skin, the material capable of detecting a magnetic field and transferring a perceivable stimulus to the skin, wherein the perceivable stimulus relates to the magnetic field.”

In a 15 March 2012 article by Vlad Bobleanta on the blog unwiredview.com, the proposed “haptic feedbacK” technology is described thus:

In the first described embodiment of the patent, you’d wear a sort of material that’s attachable to the skin. On your forearm, for example. This material can do two things: detect a magnetic field, and emit a vibration.

The material could be paired with a phone, for example, like Bluetooth accessories are paired to electronics. The phone, however, would have to be capable of emitting varying magnetic fields.

So then, for example, when someone calls that phone, it will send out a specific magnetic field. The material will detect that, and will start vibrating in a certain pattern. That pattern could be different according to who’s calling, or it could be different according to what exactly is happening on the phone (a phone call, text message, and so on).

For this to work, the phone would have to send out a different magnetic field for each action, because the material would associate a different type of vibration with each kind of magnetic field it detects. The vibrations would happen by magnetically manipulating the material.

I refuse to believe I’m the only one who isn’t thinking “forearm” when considering potential attachment points for this stuff, and the last sentence in the quoted segment above made the little devils that sit on each of my shoulders, and that one who lives in another place, cackle and rub their little red hands even more gleefully. I am predicting, dear reader, that this marks a bold step into the integration of sex toys into the list of human communications “needs” our shiny and ever so portable instruments can accommodate.

Reach out and touch someone indeed.