Photo: wikimedia
Creepy.
By Elizabeth Licata — Written on Jun 19, 2015
The main problem with sex dolls — besides the flat, creepy doll eyes and absence of a soul — has always been their lack of sparkling conversational skills. But all that might be about to change.
The maker of the famous RealDoll sex toy says he's working on building a sex doll robot that can actually talk back.
Matt McMullen's RealDoll is a famous and weirdly successful line of hyper-realistic, life-sized silicone sex dolls with fully customizable features like skin, hair, and eye color, as well as facial features and body type.
People already pay up to $10,000 apiece for these dolls, and according to The New York Times, McMullen says a new, talking version of the doll is in development and expected to be on the market within two years.
According to McMullen, the next frontier in sex robot technology is the Realbotix head, which will let the doll blink, open its mouth, talk, and presumably moan.
Photo: wikimedia
Photo: wikimedia
Photo: wikimedia
The Realbotix head will screw on to an existing RealDoll body, so customers won't need to buy a whole new sex doll to get the upgrade. The head will, however, cost another $10,000 on its own.
While the Realbotix sex doll head is designed to be able to chat with its owner, it probably won't make the doll into a witty conversationalist that one could bring along to fancy dinner parties. It's primarily designed to make the doll seem like it's enjoying the sex acts its owner is performing on it.
"What is she thinking? Does she like it?" said McMullen of his attempts to create a robotic sex doll that can mimic human emotions. "If you can create that, or the illusion of that, it's going to be a much more impressive pay-off than, 'Wow, she can gyrate her hips by herself.'"
Not that the gyrating hips are off the table, of course. McMullen says that once the Realbotix head is perfected and on the market, the next step will be to create a fully functional robot body for the RealDoll.
When that body is complete, McMullen says his fully functional, animatronic sex robots could cost as much as $60,000, and you just know there will be customers lined up to pay it.
Apparently, people prefer a realistic-looking robot to real sex. And not just regular people, but millionaires. For $60,000 a pop, no average Joe is going to mortgage their house for a sex doll.
Or maybe they would. Who knows?
