Pornohapsy

I can't believe that no one has coined that word yet.

I was reading about recent advances in haptic interfaces, these are touch-based interfaces to computers or other machines. There has been a lot of work in what I call "poking" interfaces, or the equivalent of sensory feedback through a little stick. That's fine for doing surgery remotely, but I hardly ever have to do that.

What I was promised, 15 years ago, is that I could be dancing with a virtual giant lobster while wearing full-body sensors Real Soon Now.

Of course, we all heard the snickering and giggling in the background. We know what the internet is really used for. I run a dictionary web site, and the random sampling of what's on people's mind while using the internet or even their mobile phones does not speak well of the maturity of the average technology user. We all know what sort of tactile and sensory feedback applications will drive this market.

It happened before for the internet. All the people downloading dirty pictures is what drove the market to decrease the cost of bandwidth, making the internet more useful for the rest of us.

This future market shouldn't be called pornography. That word comes from the Greek pornos (fornicator) and graphein, to write or draw. The words pornohapsy and pornohaptic are derived from haptein, to touch. I tried the word on search engines and there is nothing. Wikipedia calls it teledildonics. What do you know, lots of hits on that one. Doesn't anyone know ancient Greek anymore?

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