NY Times Talks to RealDoll's Matt McMullen About Sex Robots

NEW YORK CITY—Remember Cherry 2000? It's a 1987 film that used to show up on cable TV fairly often, set in the not-too-distant future (presumably not long after 2000 AD), about a guy whose sex-robot "wife," played by Pamela Gidley, blows a fuse, so he hires robot tracker Melanie Griffith to go into the post-atomic badlands, called The Zone, to find a replacement. The New York Times apparently found the concept interesting, and what with Matt McMullen's well-known company RealDoll having just been featured in Vanity Fair, The Times sent some of its reporters on a field trip to RealDoll's plant in Oceanside to talk to McMullen about his work to create the world's first interactive sex robot—though only a photo of some silicone faces on the construction line made it into the newspaper itself. But the seven-minute exploration of McMullen's work, called "The Uncanny Lover," is worth checking out, since it shows the concept at an early stage of development, and gives viewers a taste of what such an android lover might sound like. For example, McMullen tests the doll by asking it what it dreams about. "I have a lot of dreams," the animatronic head responds. "I dream about becoming a real person, of having a real body. I dream about learning the meaning of love. I hope to become the world's first sex robot." However, it's unclear how soon that will happen. "There are several aspects to this project," McMullen explains. "One is the robotics in terms on animatronics and getting some facial expression and head movement out of the doll. The other is the AI [artificial intelligence], the customizable programming of personality; what is she saying to me while I'm doing this? Is she enjoying this? Does she like making me feel this? If you can create that illusion or that experience, that she actually likes it, that's going to be a much more impressive payoff than 'Wow, I can't believe she's gyrating her hips by herself.'" But according to McMullen, there's a delicate balance that has to be incorporated into the finished product. "Getting the doll confused when you're talking to her and she says some things that make absolutely no sense ... can ruin the whole buildup and you never want to go to the bedroom because you think, 'Gosh, my doll's dumb,'" he explains. "You want to have that illusion that she's actually talking to you and she's got sentience. That's what overwhelms me. That's what takes the longest." However, apparently it's a mistake to make the doll too real, or you wind up in what's been termed the "uncanny valley." "You can look at even the best of my dolls and you can tell that that's a doll, and I want to keep in that arena," he warns, "because a moving doll is different from a completely detailed-to-the-finest-skin-pore copy of a person and then making it move, for me, is a little off-putting, and I think that's the uncanny valley. If you keep it far enough away from super-realism, I think you're in safer territory." McMullen is also experimenting with remotely programming the doll via Bluetooth, as well as combining virtual reality with the robots, so that one may soon be able to buy a program that allows a person with a VR headset to see a more idealized image of the robot and interact with it in both virtual and real-world settings. But at the end of the Times video, McMullen moves even further into Cherry 2000 territory. "I want to have people actually develop an emotional attachment to not only the doll, being the robot, but the actual character behind it, to develop some kind of love for this being," McMullen states. Some might find that part a little bit creepy—but what do we know? Seems audiences were happy enough with Seth MacFarlane's movie Ted, about a talking, moving, horny teddy bear, to have cleared the way for its sequel, Ted 2, which is due to hit theaters this summer! Pictured: McMullen in the RealDoll plant.