I fell over this by accident while surfing for information on the Utherverse, a steamy virtual world which I’ll report on some other time. If you ever doubted that sex was a fundamental psychological driver for the vast majority of humanity – and I never did – then watch the video below and ask yourself what has it got to do with sex? Then read on.

(Note: If your company blocks Internet videos you will not see a video frame below this sentence. In which case, login from home to watch this.)

Of course it has very little to do with sex. It’s about ultrasound and the rather surprising phenomenon that you can create very detectable local changes in air pressure using it. Ultrasound is, of course, sound outside the human range of hearing. I’m guessing that the way this works is similar to the way that noise-canceling earphones work. By directing ultrasound and also canceling waves across a given space “in the air” you will naturally end up with some areas where sound waves (and hence air pressure) increase and some where they cancel.

However, sound is vibration within a medium and the sound vibrations move the medium to some degree, so physically you will be able to detect the pressure differences, as the piece of paper in the video demonstrates. I’m guessing that also the sound device can detect when an object moves within the space it targets. There are a host of possible applications to this, particularly I can envision a 3D interface, where you need do nothing more than move your hand, head, foot or whatever to navigate the space.

So what has this to do with virtual sex? Almost nothing except that it was immediately reported that virtual sex was a potential area of application. Not, by the way, because the inventors suggested as much, but because the reporters let their minds move in that particular direction. An encouraging advance in the man machine interface? Not at all, it’s god’s gift to long distance sex.