This has been a development project of mine for almost a year now, and I’m excited to finally share it. The Teledong is a dildo with integrated sensors to detect the position of the user along the shaft. This means that you can use it to remote control strokers like The Handy, or maybe you want to use it as a motion controller to record funscripts in real-time.
Mass production hasn’t quite started yet but I am expecting to be able to start selling it sometime this fall.
The software is open source so developers can integrate support for it in games, tools, etc.
Yeah I’ve heard about this, but I don’t think it will be an issue for this device, because the specific patent in the article you linked is expired now. There is another patent for a similar system I’ve seen, but IIRC it has a number of differences, for example it’s for capacitive sensors in the dildo, while mine has optical sensors, and also it’s for the whole set of dildo+stroker as one package, while mine is only the dildo and is designed to work with third party strokers instead.
This might explain why a lot of toy makers arent US based. A lot of US patents are invalid in the EU for being too generic.
And on that there are a few other factors in play that might just mark the patent FRAND. This way you usualy can just continue the production at the cost of a small fee (and yes, this fee can be VERY small - lower than €0,01 - as it considers the general product price range as factor to decide Reasonable part).
As for slider based control, you might be interested in knowing that in the software I am creating for the Teledong, I will also add simple mouse movement input so that you can control strokers live without actually owning the device. It won’t be browser-based though