On 2001.12.09, Miriam English <miriam@werple.net.au> wrote:
>
> Porn... well, people keep telling me that it is a huge driving force, but I
> haven't really seen much evidence of it. Maybe I have been treading the
> "wrong" paths thru the net all these years. I have come across precious
> little porn.
Think about a lot of the technological advances in computing the
last 10 years. The big one that comes to mind is the WWW -- back
in the day, people looking for porn had to jump through hoops to
decode porn off of Usenet. They had clunky gopher and FTP clients
where you had to download the whole porn file (over a slow 9600 or
slower link) just to see it and decide if you want to keep it.
GIF was limited to 256 colors and the compression ratio wasn't
much to speak of. Then came the WWW, providing a grope-and-click
interface to porn. Small file thumbnails to preview it before
commiting your low-speed link to downloading it. JPEG to bring
better quality at smaller file sizes.
Then came higher bandwidth to push more porn around.
Then, came audio streaming. Then video streaming. Then,
A/V streaming. For pay-per-view porn, of course. I think some
of Real Networks biggest early customers were all porn shops.
You really think the commercial business market really drove
that company's technology forward? I don't.
Today, there's work on tele-immersive stuff, under the guise
of virtual conferencing and all that rubbish. You know, if
someone just marketed tele-immersion with force-feedback and
smell-o-vision to the porn industry, you'd see that technology
develop orders of magnitude faster and come to market way before
the private sector researchers could blink. And it'd be at a
$99.95 price point and shipped in discrete brown paper wrapping,
overnight to your doorstep.
I think a good place to start would be to develop and market
force-feedback bondage equipment - collars, manacles, and the
like - so that a "virtual Dom" could control them on a customer
slave remotely. Big money in that, I tell you. Couple that
with A/V streaming of "your own personal virtual Dom" and
you're in business.
Yow. If anyone steals this idea, please cut me in on some of
the money, please. :-)
$ whois virtuadom.com
No match for "VIRTUADOM.COM".
There you go.
-- Dossy
--
Dossy Shiobara mail: dossy@panoptic.com
Panoptic Computer Network web: http://www.panoptic.com/
"He realized the fastest way to change is to laugh at your own
folly -- then you can let go and quickly move on." (p. 70)
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