3D SexVilla: Now With Bunny Ears For All

A couple of weeks ago I kvetched mildly about the limited “furry” support in the 3D SexVilla software I’ve been playing with, saying:

Right now there appears to be only two outfits (the tiger for male avatars, the bunny for female) and the hoods are closed-face, so using any oral-contact poses causes the software to remove the hoods. And, personally, I find that the expressive faces of the normal hoodless models go along way toward making the simulation seem lifelike; the unmoving furry-faces, for me, detract from the illusion.

Now, mind you, I’m aware that this is a little bit like complaining that the dancing bear isn’t much of a square dancer and couldn’t do-si-do his way out of a wet paper bag.

Doesn’t matter. This is the 21st century, my software toys are supposed to do what I tell them to. Fortunately, that’s generally just a matter of waiting for the next update. And so it proved in this case. Guess what? Now with Bunny ears!

This time around, it’s not “You’re the girl, so you have to be the bunny” either. Guys can wear the ears too, and will if properly cajoled:

Similar Sex Blogging:

• Furries Going At It
• Slow Night At The Club
• Better Fantasy-To-Image Conversion Tools
• 3D Sex Games And Open Standards
• 3D SexVilla2: Like Better Paper Dolls For Grownups

Furries Going At It

Here’s something you don’t see every day, courtesy of the “Furry Fandom” sex pack in 3D SexVilla. Furries going at it!

Sadly for our furrier friends, the furry functionality of the 3D SexVilla software is somewhat limited. Right now there appears to be only two outfits (the tiger for male avatars, the bunny for female) and the hoods are closed-face, so using any oral-contact poses causes the software to remove the hoods. And, personally, I find that the expressive faces of the normal hoodless models go along way toward making the simulation seem lifelike; the unmoving furry-faces, for me, detract from the illusion. But perhaps a furry-fetishist might see it differently.

Furry things I think the software would need to be really furry: more animal types, an assortment of tails, half-face furry masks, furry leggings and boots, furry gloves/paws..

Similar Sex Blogging:

• Paper Dolls and Customized Dildos
• Problems In Furry Land
• Sex And The Singularity?
• Beastie Art
• Subservient Chicken: Have It Your Way
• Not Your Father's Ponygirl

Slow Night At The Club

There’s something deeply, bizarrely, and recursively ironic about this. While I was playing with the 3D SexVilla BrainImageInstantiator (mock trademark hereby claimed), an exceedingly primitive AI (aka weblog spamming script) landed in Faustus’s post about the future of such tools, and successfully (albeit briefly) hacked a nascent argument about the potential capabilities of AIs by taking three sentence fragments from the previous comment and rearranging them into something that looked superficially plausible to my own primitive high-speed “is this comment human?” Turing-testing algorithms.

Ladies and gentlemen and assorted avatars, please fasten your seatbelts, this is gonna be a long and bumpy ride. And there’s no telling where we might end up.

Meanwhile, back at the dance club, it’s after hours and one of the t-girls (that’s the term the 3D SexVilla software uses, not mine) has gotten bored and perhaps a little lonely:

Better Fantasy-To-Image Conversion Tools

Much like Bacchus I have no shortage of images in my head which I’d like to have out in the world, and also like him I have neither any real skill, nor any talent that I can discern, for doing my own drawing. So needless to say I’ve been following Bacchus’s recent posts on 3D SexVilla with considerable interest. Now, there have been software engines for creating high-quality graphics around for quite a while, but my own sense is that you have to be pretty damn good to get results like this:

(“The Seventh Time I Died,” by Scandinavian artist Johan Flood, gallery of his work here.)

And naturally, as a committed Linux user, I hold out high hopes for the development of MakeHuman, which can also produce impressive Poser-like results:

Still, I suspect that this engine won’t be all that simple to use.

But simpler things are surely coming, and that will mean significant changes. The point of this post will be to speculate about them a bit. There’s reason for optimism here.

The hope is that whatever interfaces we have will be easier and cheaper to use. That seems almost sure to happen, and when it does, it will mean that the sort of publicly available kink out there will be stranger, and better, and kinkier than before, because you’ll have not just thousands but millions of weird imaginations at work. That means a lot of fetishes and a lot more strange little communities of sexual interest. It was Voltaire, I think, who once remarked that if you have two religions in land they will cut each other’s throats, but if you have thirty there will be peace. As in religion, so in sex, maybe. It will be hard to have oppression of sexual minorities when pretty much everyone is part of some sexual minority or another.

A possible further social implication might be an escalation of interest in transhumanism. Once people can see vividly all the strange and wonderful things that might happen, the more they might be interested in enhancing themselves in ways such that these things could happen.

And there may be deeper technological implications as well. I’ve mulled over a suggestion made by Bacchus that perhaps in a decade or so we will have artificial intelligence (AI) engines capable of turning natural language scripts or instructions into illustrations.

That’s a tricky thought to get my brain around. Although it’s not really my thing, I sat down and composed a little bit of script in honor of the latest little weird community of interest to catch my eye out there on the internet: the so-called “shrinking woman” (SW) enthusiasts. (There really is something for everyone out there.)

(The HTML tables above reproduce a script layout by Celtx, which is a very cool (and free) tool for writing screenplays, comic book scripts, etc.)

Now the above script probably isn’t your thing either, but bear with me. There would be a lot of detail to fill in here. Is Professor Strange a Mephistophelean figure or a Jerry Lewis-like nutty professor? Is his laboratory a Bond-villain lair? An antiseptic academic space? A steampunk setting? Is Stacey an anatomically-implausible comic book cover babe? Or perhaps short and zaftig? Blond, red-headed, brunette, raven-haired? European? Asian? African? I imagine you were filling in all the details as you read the script, probably in the way that you found the most gratifying.

Now in my experience (admittedly limited) in working with professional artists, I’ve prepared written descriptions to which they’ve responded with multiple pencil sketches and a query: which among these best captures what you’re looking for? It’s a process that often reveals pleasant surprises, bits of self-knowledge that I didn’t have before. (Though, to be sure, it’s also expensive, at least when I’m paying the commission.)

Now a really good AI engine would probably not just stop at turning out drafts based on your scripts. A really good AI engine will learn about you, improving its searches over time to read what you give it and turn out things that are better and better, more and more like what your mind is searching for, things you find more and more appealing. A really good AI engine — and this might be a few decades further down the road from what Bacchus first suggested to me — would be a partner, something (perhaps we might even call “it” a someone) that serves as a partner, something that builds up within itself an image of your own erotic consciousness and imagination.

(I realize now there must be artists out there beginning to gnash their teeth. Sorry guys. Feel free to imagine a future in which AI engines manage to replace the annoying writer. Maybe I deserve it.)

And that’s significant, because it’s a step forward for both you and the machines. Nietzsche wrote an aphorism in Beyond Good and Evil: Grad und Art der Geschlechtlichkeit eines Menschen reicht bis in den letzten Gipfel seines Geistes hinauf. Someone’s sexuality reaches to the very top of his or her spirit. Most likely he was right. You create a record of yourself, not just in pictures, but in intelligent software. If there’s ever to be any hope of overcoming death through indirect mind uploading, as Paul Almond has proposed, this could be an unparalleled record of yourself, the recording that reaches right to the top of your spirit.

Now that would make possible one amazing future.

3D Sex Games And Open Standards

Ever since last week’s post on 3D SexVilla I’ve been trying to decide whether the whole thing is just a transient gimmick, or whether it’s a tool sufficient to allow non-artists to create and share visual instantiations of their fantasies. If it’s the latter, and if it catches on, it could prove to be quite a phenomenon — one I think is potentially important. (I’ve long been frustrated by the fact that I can visualize things I’d like to see, but there’s no way to instantiate them in visual form short of hiring an artist or spending a few years in art school. Sufficiently good computer software will be an important step in solving this.)

One of the things I’ve been trying to figure out is how open the product is. If the design work that users do can be readily saved and shared, there’s likely to be a fan community that grows up around the product, as there long has been around the quite-a-bit-harder-to-use and (IMO) not-for-the-non-artist 3d-modeling tool Poser.

Thus I was heartened to see the following in the summary of recent changes to the latest release of the 3D SexVilla software:

All New Pose Editor

Our software engineers have spent countless hours fine-tuning this ‘Pose Editor’ release. It’s an exclusive powerful new in-game motion control tool featuring a collapsible user interface with tons of sliders and controls that enables you to create your own poses, however and whatever you want. It’s an updated mannequin model rigged to allow precise and exacting control of body positions, joint positioning and rotation editing as well as new 3D face shaping, mouth and tongue morphing animations and hand gestures.

Poser Editor allows you to also import poses from the Gamerotica community or from Daz3D/Poser based BVH exports. Using standards based BVH allows you to quickly import existing animations and convert them to 3D Kink and create and watch some of the most advanced sex animations possible.

Still no word on whether the local save formats are usefully exportable/shareable, but the standards-based imports is, at least, good news.

3D SexVilla2: Like Better Paper Dolls For Grownups

As faithful ErosBlog readers will have deduced from the unbroken string of desultory image posts, it hasn’t been an internet-facing week for your trusty sex correspondent. Combine a mild sinus infection with at least four different flavors of family craziness, and you get a Bacchus who neglects the fans. Meanwhile, on the internets, the progress of science and the arts moves rapidly ahead, all unheeded.

I refer, of course, to the new 3D SexVilla software offering. Alert readers (which is most of you!) will remember my post from a few weeks ago called Paper Dolls And Customized Dildos, in which I discussed a new software offering from Hustler that combined EverQuest-style graphics with sexually-explicit user-selectable sexual content. Well, I’ve become aware that the Hustler product, and a similar new release from the Kink.com people, are branded versions of the SexVilla2 offering from Thrixxx.

Early in the week, I started seeing screenshots and web ads all over the place for the various products. Bondage Blog started posting screenshots on Thursday, and by yesterday, Spanking Blog was on board. Somewhere in there I started getting emails offering me free looks at the product, but I manfully soldiered on with my mundane duties. Which doesn’t mean I wasn’t itchy to play with the virtual sex dollies.

Last night was Friday night, which is fleet night in my internet spaceship game. (Some of you will understand when I say “It rocked; we caught a Loki and ate it with catsup.”) So, no 3D SexVilla for me last night.

Thus, my impressions in this post are very very preliminary. Visually, the software is stunning. The girls are pretty and sexy yet safely on the “obviously virtual” side of the uncanny valley, customization options are astonishing, the camera viewpoints are flexible and easy to control, and there’s an early-and-obvious addictive quality to the thing. Having been conventionally-socialized as a male child by parents with 1950s attitudes, I never played with dolls, nor yet even “action figures” much; but I can see the lure here to the “she’s cute like this, but I wonder how the same pose would look with a vest and no bra, and what if we lost the hat and her pants?” dress-up part of the game.

That said, I haven’t progressed very far into the actual game. It’s obviously designed to be “sticky” in the commercial sense; as you play with your virtual paper dolls and achieve various orgasm-related goals, you earn virtual coins with which to unlock “sex packs” consisting of more models, more clothes, more sex toys, more positions, more of everything. So far, all I’ve done is summon the existing models, pose them, move them, dress and undress them, watch them writhe under the virtual ministrations of various plugs and dildos, and marvel at how entertaining such simple pleasures are. Anybody who has ever spent four hours in the character selection and customization screens of a game will understand what I’m talking about.

That said, I can confirm what I said about the Hustler version of the product at the beginning of the month: 3D SexVilla feels to me like the avatar-generation tool-set for an absolutely killer massively multiplayer online role playing game, but it’s not actually a multiplayer game — at least, not yet. It may be online (the software wants an internet connection, at least on startup) but it’s not any kind of multiplayer. You can play at satisfying the computer-driven avatars, you can script your virtual sex players and storyboard them and make movies of them, but there’s no way to drive your avatar while it interacts with (er, make that “fucks, sucks, screws or spanks”) another avatar being driven by somebody else. Or not, at least, at this time; I can’t see the tech team that put this much effort into building the avatar tools (gentlemen and ladies, there are entire screens for customizing makeup and facial hair!) not having long term plans that will let people cybersex each other with ’em. It just wouldn’t be sensible.

Anybody out there who is playing with it is invited to share their own impressions in the comments. Do you think this is a mere curiosity, or do you suspect that it’s the thin leading edge of a new “new thing” that’s eventually going to feature prominently in everyone’s online sex life?