SEGA Moves into Artificial Girlfriend Production - NewsSEGA Toys. Presenting... the robot girlfriend!
We're not even kidding. The little lady you see to the right is a 38cm tall robot girlfriend set to go on sale in September in Japan. Using infra red sensors, EMA (yes, of course she has a name!) will kiss nearby people (we don't know if she has a sexual preference), switching into what its makers call 'love mode'.
If you were to take a stab at the target market for this dinky little damsel, you'd no doubt go for 'lonely men'. You'd be right (the marketing materials carry no message regarding 'lonely lesbians' though).
"Strong, tough and battle-ready are some of the words often associated with robots, but we wanted to break that stereotype and provide a robot that's sweet and interactive", said Minako Sakanoue, a spokeswoman for SEGA Toys. "She's very lovable and though she's not a human, she can act like a real girlfriend." \ advertisement /
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So you know, EMA stands for Eternal Maiden Actualization. Sexy, eh? She can also hand out business cards and sing and dance. Just like a real girlfriend!
SEGA hopes to sell 10,000 of them in the first year, at around £90 a pop.
SPOnG, for one, has many questions that have been raised by this development. If we had a real female companion and got an EMA, would it count as cheating? Is 'she' technically female, given that she presumably has no genitalia? Will we feel jealous of the 9,999 other men who will (hypothetically!) have robot girlfriends just like ours? When do we get the hard light holographic technology that will give us game girlfriends?
Whatever the answers may be to those questions, Inflatable Pam is looking a bit worried over in the corner...
