At the suburban Los Angeles headquarters of world-class pornographers Vivid Video, the technological future of the increasingly high-tech adult-entertainment industry is on proud display. And frankly, it looks a little cheesy. In a front office of Vivid's interactive-media division, a black Lycra cat suit clings snugly to a shiny black plastic female mannequin, twisted phone wires dangling from electrodes attached at the breasts, crotch and other sensitive locations. As a fashion statement, it's half Star Trek: Voyager, half Radio Shack. As a concept, it's just this side of plausible. Designed to plug into a computer's printer port, the suit will one day let the user reach out over the Internet and touch someone in a very special way, Vivid executives claim. By clicking on the appropriate parts of an onscreen body image, they say, a remote partner will be able to send stimulating sensations -- heat, feather touch, vibration -- direct to the suit wearer's wired erogenous zones.

And when can we expect this Jetsonian sexual future to arrive? "Probably about Septemberish," says Vivid's co-founder David James, 58, a burly transplanted Welshman. The technology, he explains, has already been shown to work over a local connection. A Taiwanese company has been tapped to produce a slick consumer version of the suit, possibly in neoprene. And multimillion-dollar possibilities for its use in commercial phone sex and other adult media have been lovingly sketched out. All that's missing, says James, is FCC approval, which he thinks will hinge on Vivid's proving the safety of the device. "If, for example, we transmit a signal over the Internet and something goes wrong, and the guy's wearing a pacemaker and he gets fried or something like that ..." he says earnestly. You can imagine the possibilities.

Barring any such mishap, though, what's to stop the feds from giving Vivid the go-ahead? It's not as if this were the first raunchy application anyone has thought up for digital technology. In fact, it's not even clear that digital technology would be the social and economic phenomenon it is today if it weren't for the kinkier purposes that millions of people are putting it to. Cybersmut, digital porn, the final frontier of erotic entertainment -- whatever you want to call it, the prurient use of new media like computers, the Internet and DVD is among the most powerful forces driving these technologies into our lives. And with every new digital innovation, porn is being reshaped, transformed into something that may not seem as futuristic as a cybersex bodysuit but in many ways represents a far more significant break with the past.

Not that there's anything novel about the cozy relationship between pornography and new communications technologies. Among the earliest daguerreotypes were many that showed prostitutes romping in little more than their stockings. And cinema was even more sexually precocious. "As soon as they started cranking that movie camera, they were making porn movies," says Constance Penley, a professor of film and women's studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Penley also cites, as media historians often do, the key role adult films later played in sparking initial sales of VCRs, as well as the porn industry's subsequent transformation by the influx of videocam-wielding amateurs. Whatever the medium, she observes, the pattern of its early cultural life has often been a familiar one: "It's there, it becomes available, and then sex is what drives people to explore all its possible uses."

By all accounts, though, the eagerness with which people are exploring digital technology's erotic possibilities is without precedent. And that, combined with the protean evolution of the technologies themselves, points to a long-term future for porn, whose ultimate dimensions are effectively beyond reckoning. To Vivid Video's president, Steven Hirsch, who got his start in the industry back when adult film was still 8-mm loops shown at stag parties, the present moment looks as ripe with opportunity as any he has witnessed. "I have seen the explosion of the adult industry," he says, "but with all of these new media, I really do believe we're just at the beginning of the real explosion."

For Hirsch's end of the business -- the feature-film market -- what's scheduled to blow up next is DVD. Tape still reigns as the medium of choice on adult-video shelves everywhere, of course, and no one expects DVD to take its place sooner than five years from now. But DVD has become a kind of fetish object for the industry, promising new avenues of profit growth in a market glutted with product. These new shiny discs are an added selling point for an audience grown much more discriminating.

Selling point No. 1? The crisp, clear quality of digital image and sound. The way the picture comes alive, the way the sound track seems as if it -- whoops! wait a minute, that's how mainstream studios are selling it. For porn producers, as for consumers, picture quality is secondary. What gets them excited about DVD is an arcane feature built into the new players -- the multiple-angle button, which lets viewers switch the perspective of a scene to any of up to four different camera angles. "A perfect tool for your cultivated voyeur," says Vivid's James. "It's a godsend for the adult industry."

He may be right. But if reports filtering back from retailers are to be believed, it's not just cultivated voyeurs who are picking up adult DVD titles for the angles. Plenty of customers are apparently buying DVD porn just to find out how that mysterious multiple-angle button on their player is supposed to work, since mainstream movie companies don't generally offer the option. "Scorsese and Coppola are not too crazy about letting Joe Six-Pack go, 'Oh, let's change the look of The Godfather,'" explains a Vivid exec. But porn producers, true to form, are only too happy to help people explore the uses of the new technology.

In the end, though, it's not going to be the multiple angles that make DVD porn take off. If adult titles ever come to dominate the DVD market the way they did early VHS, it will most likely be because they offer, potentially, the same thing videotape did: more privacy. PC-based DVD-ROM drives, as distinct from stand-alone DVD players, are just now becoming standard issue on new computers. And once they reach critical mass in homes and offices, a vast market of pornophiles will for the first time have the option of watching full-screen, hi-res adult video in the seclusion of their ergonomic workspaces.

Further into the imagined future of robotics, androids like Star Trek's Data become a reality, and there the possibilities are obvious. Sociology professor Joel Snell predicted the coming of "soft and pliant," humanlike "sexbots" in a 1997 issue of the Futurist magazine, and warned of social consequences -- people becoming addicted to the superhuman pleasures of robot sex, jealous spouses destroying their sexbot rivals and suing the manufacturer, "technovirgins" going through life never feeling the touch of any but robotic flesh.

And then, of course, there's that bodysuit. Which, it turns out, has a distinguished conceptual pedigree reaching back through the annals of wild speculation almost to the dawn of cyberhype. Way back in 1990, technopundit Howard Rheingold published an article titled "Teledildonics," in which he introduced, with tongue lightly in cheek, the notion of a virtual-reality sex suit able to impart tactile sensations just as good as the real thing. To his chagrin, the technically improbable fantasy became a cultural icon in the years that followed. Magazines put it on their cover. VR hackers swore they'd have it up and running any day. Digerati saw it as a beacon leading to a world in which even the most basic of human realities would be turned upside down and inside out by the advent of the digital.

And now the icon can be found clinging to a mannequin in the offices of a San Fernando Valley porn studio. An irony, of course, is that someone has finally built what purports to be a working version of the device, however crude, and it looks more like a joke than it ever did. Who could possibly feel aroused inside such a contraption? Not even its chief booster, David James, who cheerfully admits, "If I had that thing on, I'd just start laughing." Ah, but think about it as version 1.0.

But let's face it: if it's privacy they want, porn watchers are better off getting their viewing matter straight from the Internet, where they'll never have to skulk in the aisles of an adult-DVD section or face a bored salesclerk. That's one reason the smart money is on Net-based delivery systems to beat out all other adult media at the marketplace in coming years.

Another reason is hard numbers. Adult websites are a nearly $1 billion-a-year business. That's close to a tenth of the size of the sex industry as a whole, and with current annual growth rates of 20% to 30% showing no signs of abating, it will soon claim the lion's share. Those figures include income from a variety of sites, ranging from vast online photo archives to steamy chat rooms to e-catalogs for sex-toy merchants. But looming largest is a high-octane engine for growth known as "streaming video": the first, rough draft of the long awaited and much hyped convergence of television and the Internet.

"We've got the live feeds, the 24-hour strippers, but that's not really all that exciting. It's 'Been there, done that,'" says Danni Ashe, 31, creator, star and proprietor of Danni's Hard Drive, a subscription site that offers gigabytes of breast-centric cheesecake and grosses some $3.6 million a year. What Ashe really wants to be doing when the worlds of TV and the Internet collide is the same thing big boys like TCI and Time Warner want to be doing -- original, interactive, multichannel programming.

To be sure, the big boys aren't likely to be serving up programs like "The Audition," in which Ashe plans to let three or more amateur strippers compete for the instant votes of mouse-clicking viewers, with the winner receiving a cash prize as well as nude-modeling assignments. Nor will any established television executive be green-lighting the world's first interactive nude weather channel, for which Ashe has nabbed both a domain name (nudeweather.com) and an ad pitch ("Wouldn't you rather look at two beautiful women than Willard Scott?").

But that doesn't mean the media establishment shouldn't be paying close attention to Ashe and other Web-sex entrepreneurs now moving toward the broadband promised land. After all, the pornographers are probably going to get there first, and for fairly inexorable reasons. As one of the few business sectors on the Web consistently turning a profit, they've got the money to blow on the latest high-end webcasting equipment. They've got the incentive to blow it too, since their avid audience routinely repays even the crudest new-media experiments with phenomenal revenue. And so, once more, porn seems destined to lead the way into virgin technological territory, mapping it out like an advance scout for the armies of capital.

Where will it lead us after that? The future of porn gets intriguingly hazy. Pornographers tend to be an opportunistic bunch, leaping on new technologies as soon as they emerge. But you don't have to be in the business to speculate on what might happen when adult entertainment intersects with certain long-range technology trends.