A report in 2008 suggested that teledildonics, along with text and email and webcams, can be used to "wind each other up to fever pitch during the working day" as a prelude to sex with a human during the evening hours.
The idea of virtual sex has been prominent in literature, fiction and popular culture, and promoters of these devices have claimed since the 1980s they are the "next big thing" in cybersex technology.
A report in the Chicago Tribune in 1993 suggested that teledildonics was "the virtual-reality technology that may one day allow people wearing special bodysuits, headgear and gloves to engage in tactile sexual relations from separate, remote locations via computers connected to phone lines.
In the words of one early text on the subject:[16] Indeed, pushing at the cultural-technical limits of the integrity-fragmentation contradiction can, in the short term, supercharge the disembodied body with 'sensual', transgressive ambiguity.
For example, 'teledildonics', computer-simulated; sexual arousal by wearing plugged-in bodysuits, may never become widely practised, but it certainly provokes interest as a risque possibility ... [T]echno-sex contributes to hollowing out the corporeal taken-for-grantedness of which, paradoxically, it depends.Many companies experimenting in the field have been hit with patent lawsuits.
[17][18] At the 2016 South by Southwest Festival, virtual reality entrepreneur Ela Darling asserted that patent holders were preventing the production of teledildonic technology.