Sex toys these days can pretty much do everything but your taxes. They can be controlled remotely. They can be worn as jewelry. They can even vibrate to the rhythm of your favorite song. But there aren’t many sex toys out there that claim to do it all—other than the Mod, a “multivibrating open-source dildo platform” created by the sex-tech startup Comingle that is currently fundraising on Indiegogo.
What is a “multivibrating open-source dildo,” you ask? Basically, it’s a hackable sex toy working off of an Arduino-based board—which is called the Dilduino, naturally—that you can customize to do pretty much whatever you want.
“Most other smart toys out right now are hard-coded for specific uses,” said Comingle co-founder Andrew Quitmeyer, citing the examples of OhMiBod’s Club Vibe, which pulsates to music, and the Vibease, which can be controlled via smartphone. “Our toy is an open platform capable of doing all those types of new, interesting interactions, and much more.”
You can hook the Mod up to a heartbeat sensor, so the vibrator actually syncs up to the rhythm of your heartbeat. You can hook it up your webcam during a Skype sex session, so the more your partner moves, the more the dildo will vibrate in response.
“If you are dancing around in front of a webcam, you can play with different motions to get different reactions out of your partner,” said Quitmeyer.
You can even figure out how to trigger your partner’s toy by interacting with other objects, like sucking on a banana or spanking your partner with a spatula. The Mod’s functionality is only limited by your imagination.
Aesthetically, the Mod isn’t all that sophisticated. It’s basically just a really large, green dildo. But the simplicity of its design is precisely what makes it so adaptable to users’ wide-ranging desires. Just like the Transformer sex toy by Picobong, the Mod is gender-neutral.
“By making the models and form of our designs open, it lets people know how to change or alter it to fit their bodies,” Quitmeyer said.
With its current fundraising campaign for the Mod, Comingle ultimately hopes to bring open-source sex technology to the masses. It launched the OsSex library, a GitHub forum where people can exchange their own sensor and hacking combos, and one of the Indiegogo rewards is a “sexy Mod workshop” where Comingle’s team of hackers visit your home or workplace (!) and teach you and your friends how to hack your dildo.
All of that said, the appeal of the Mod—which will cost $159—is inherently limited. If you don’t geek out over open-source technology and you just want to use your vibrator to have an orgasm, the Mod is probably not for you. But Quitmeyer predicts that pretty soon, almost all sex toys “will be re-programmable and controllable by all sorts of things.” Who knows? Maybe someday your vibrator will be able to do your taxes after all.
Photo by herkulano/Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)
