Durex's vibrating pants: foreplay gropes its way to the future

They call it Fundawear: a bra, his and hers electric pants, and an app to control them. Its creators Durex Australia claim it could be the "future of foreplay", enabling long-distance lovers to touch and tease each other from halfway across the planet. Or at least have a bit of a cheeky grope.

The technology made its debut in a video posted on the company's YouTube page on Wednesday, of a young couple giggling as the man uses the power of the internet to prod his beloved girlfriend in the breast. "It feels like you're touching me," she says, for the benefit of the more sceptical viewer.

In two accompanying videos, a photogenic pair of designers explain the difference between Fundawear and your average pair of vibrating knickers: the specially created bra and underpants have been fitted with miniature actuators to produce something more like the sensation of touch. There are five of these actuators, the technology used to make mobile phones vibrate, in each cup of the bra, and six more in the pants, with corresponding buttons on the smartphone app.

Durex is describing Fundawear's combination of touch technology, long-distance control and underwear as "a world first". But there are plenty of similar – if quite a bit racier – products on the market. Take Vibease, for example, a miniature vibrator with its own text and picture-messaging app, launched on Google Play last September.

Or, for the more adventurous, LovePalz, "the world's first internet-enabled sex toy", which doesn't have an app but more than makes up for it in brazen sexual realism. The LovePalz kit consists of a pair of devices, one yonic and one phallic, named a Hera and a Zeus. Connect online with them and the devices "sense your motions and immediately send them real-time to your lover".

Even prudish couples keen for more innocent physical contact have options. Last year students at MIT created the Like-A-Hug jacket, which inflates to "hug" the wearer whenever someone "likes" one of their Facebook posts. And in 2006 London-based designers CuteCircuit created an internet-controlled HugShirt, which used special sensors to measure hug strength, skin warmth and heartbeat.

So is Fundawear a revolution in long-distance loving? Or just a fancy pair of vibro-pants? And will separated lovers really be touch-starved enough to pay money for a long-range boob prodder? Durex Australia reckons so.

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