They aren’t even in the stores yet, but I’m pretty sure that after months and months of viral marketing you heard about Google Glass all right. In fact, this revolutionary piece of hardware immediately became the darling of the media just because it lends to sensationalism and speculations like a charm.
Just a quick recap for the distracted: we are talking about very expensive and rather silly looking wearable computer, shaped like a pair of glasses but that you cannot easily use if you actually wear glasses. It is meant to become an extension of your smartphone and to superimpose digital information gathered from Google’s services over your field of view.
Besides giving you instant access to all kinds of fact-checking data, the most interesting feature of Glass is the camera, which is just perfect to record anything and everything you see. It is, to all purposes, “invisible” – recording is voice-activated, and when you are around someone wearing the device, you tend to quickly forget that their eyes have now the capability of immediately youtubing whatever you say and do.

All of this leads to a wonderfully smart discourse about surveillance culture, the loss of privacy in the XXI century, citizen journalism and better whistleblowing tools. That is, however, something we all discuss to death everywhere else. From our kinky point of view, what really picked our interest are the erotic possibilities of such a device. And no, we weren’t all that clever either.
Voyeur and POV (‘point of view’, in the “adult industry” jargon) porn were the first applications that came to mind to just about everyone. New technology does that: the printing press, instant cameras, VHS video recorders and tapes, computer networks and the Internet, smartphones, e-books… in all these cases and more, a very big part of their commercial success came from the easier access they allowed to forbidden knowledge. Or, in plain words, to porn.

This is also why I didn’t write about Glass before. As soon as the project was announced, a flurry of announces, retractions, alarms, legal threats and other really empty talk over the whole Glass porn concept.  Nothing came out of it, if only for the simple fact that the device is very corporate-controlled by Google. Its “end user legal agreement”, in example – that boring and overlong pop-up window you usually close clicking ‘I agree’ – explicitly forbids to lend or even allow others to use your own unit. More than that, according to rumors the final product will include a “porn recognizing algorithm” to disable recording whenever there is too much bare skin on camera, and sure as hell Google reserves the right to remotely and permanently shut off your device should “inappropriate” content surface with your unique user ID attached to it. And don’t even mention the nausea-inducing bobbing typical of unstabilized POV videos like the ones Glass take.
Are you depressed yet? If you are not, just remember what Apple did with its apps ecology a few months ago, not only refusing to sell adult apps on its own store, but initiating legal action against independent stores dealing with mature content. Of course history teaches us that no matter how loud the corporations are going to scream, both contents and hardware will be eventually free, liberated by horny hackers just like every other technology before this. But in the meantime we’ll have to play by the rules, or at the least joke about them.

This is exactly what a high-tech porn company called Mikandi did. Well, what they actually did was to take a very liberal interpretation of the legal agreement and go ahead making a porn video. Judging from the “behind the scenes” trailer they released, it wasn’t an especially easy or pleasant experience – but a funny one. And this doesn’t really matter at all, because agreements and technology are going to keep changing a lot in the coming months, so this is best considered a curiosity.
What I really enjoyed, however, was the über-silly concept video the company also released, featuring porn stars James Deen and Andy San Dimas, with a special cameo appearance of… well, you’ll see. I sort of suppose this clip is much more realistic than what you’d like to believe. Welcome to (another) future of porn.