LAS VEGAS—"This is just managing a different kind of explosion."

Grant Bechthold used to make bomb disposal suits and electronic countermeasures to stop roadside explosives. Now he's the VP of product development for the blandly named Standard Innovations, coming up with new sex toys to follow the popular WeVibe.

WeVibe doesn't look like your typical vibrator, and it's not made by the typical people in the typical way. The latest WeVibe models are flexible rather than hard, a little squeezable, downright pliable. It took a guy with military experience, a "digital mannequin" named Jessie, and a couple of high-end 3D printers to get there.

"My engineering organization looks like any engineering organization," Bechthold said. "One guy is from Black and Decker. We've got Nortel people who worked on smart whiteboards."

Why You Need 400 Digital Ladyparts

Obviously, a bunch of engineers of this caliber aren't just slapping plaster of Paris around a few rods and calling it a day. WeVibe's development process starts with Jessie, a "digital mannequin" used by car manufacturers, among other companies.

Jessie is all virtual; her day job is to cram into the front and back seats of newly designed vehicles to make sure they don't cramp her kidneys. Then she heads up to WeVibe, and they insert virtual prods into her digital ladyparts to see what fits properly.

"They've got full, anatomically correct internal organs," Bechthold said. "We can take a device in the computer 3D world and insert it into the digital mannequins."

The digital mannequin has 400 different versions to represent the wide world of womanhood. "It's all shapes, all sizes, all races, everything," he said. While this definitely isn't a one-size-fits-all world, a well-designed device can fit about 70 percent of women, he said.

Once the CAD engineers are done with tireless Jessie, it's time to bring the good vibrations out into the real world. Standard prints out its prototypes on 3D printers in hard plastic and applies them to the disembodied model pelvises used to train gynecologists.

"Once we've printed off the physical devices, we have medical physical mannequins that you can actually swap conditions in and out of," he said.

Once the models have been tried out on the doctors' mannequins, then actual prototypes are made and distributed to focus groups: sexologists, existing WeVibe users, and ordinary women. For their most recent device, the company studied a group of women between 18 and 70 years old, Bechthold explained.

"We have our own captive experts for testing," Bechthold said, creating mental images that he probably didn't intend.

Hardware and Software For Your Wetware

WeVibe's flexible, high-tech vibrators have their own operating systems and upgradeable software. Much of the later testing is software refinement, improving the ways the gadgets vibrate. Since this is PCMag.com, of course I asked if you can hack or user-upgrade a WeVibe.

"We have a strategic, three-year product roadmap," Bechthold said. "Nothing's stopping the technology from being programmed and repogrammed."

But WeVibe, for now, is stopping short of teledildonics.

"We walk a knife-edge balance of bringing technology into the world without sacrificing the human intimacy experience," he said. "Technology exists today to replace the intimacy piece, but we're trying to bring in as much technology as we can without losing that human intimacy."

Further Reading

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