LAS VEGAS — At the porn convention, it’s not the smut that stands out. It’s the love.

If you’ve never been to Las Vegas, don’t go during the first week of January unless you must. With the Consumer Electronics Show and two adult entertainment conventions in town, the entire Strip is packed. It can take more than an hour just to board the monorail, where you are 90,000 times more likely to be crushed to death by engineers than by porn stars. It takes two hours to get into a restaurant if you didn’t make reservations the day before and — worst of all — some hotels jack up prices on in-room broadband.

Entering the Adult Entertainment Expo, you can’t help but ogle the gigantic high-definition screen overhead. I paused to watch a few moments of The Story of J, the first adult feature shot entirely in HD. The film features impressive production values, a beautiful cast, a female director and a plot, all of which are evident in its QuickTime trailer.

It also proves that when you get right down to it, porn is still porn. As members of the Sex Drive forum know, while I passionately defend our right to create, buy and watch adult content, I’m not much of a porn viewer.

But porn isn’t the only attraction at the expo.

If you push your way through the drooling fanboys and duck around the ex-linebackers guarding the girls as they pose for pictures and sign autographs, you’ll find the smaller, independent exhibitors displaying their wares. It’s here that you find the true gems, the romantic products that real people use for real sex — a refreshing contrast to the studio booths up front.

Sue Johanson, the “sex grandma” who hosts Talk Sex With Sue Johanson on Oxygen TV, showed me her new line of vibrators. In primary colors and suggestive but not representational shapes, the toys appeal to couples because they are indeed toys, not replacement phalluses. Think playful, not pornographic.

I then talked with Candida Royalle, who designs curvaceous, feminine sex toys in pastels; Priapus would be confused, but Venus gets it. The new Liberté could be a museum sculpture, even with its three vibration settings and extra pulsation.

My editors often remind me that most — but not all, if my e-mail is anything to go by — Wired News readers are male. Male or female, you’re definitely among the most tech-savvy people on earth. If you’ve never thought of sex toys as high-tech, here’s a chance to change your mind. (And if you’ve never thought of sex toys at all, here’s a chance to put some of your dot-com fortune to good use.)

Two aerospace engineers in love designed the Elemental Pleasures vibrators out of the same materials they used to build airplanes: anodized aluminum, austenitic stainless steel, titanium. These are high-end playthings, costing up to $600 for the titanium Le Lynx, that come with three attachments and a beautiful velvet-lined box that locks. They seal completely, so you can use them in the bath and then boil them for sanitation.

And as you can tell from my grin in the picture, they feel really, really good in your hand. I can only imagine — and I have — how good they’ll feel elsewhere.

Not long ago, vibrators were the butt of jokes, fashioned from cheap plastics you could never clean well, with life spans of a few days to a few months. They had porn stars on the cover and were marketed almost exclusively to men.

Now emerging are products that focus on couples, with packaging you’d expect to find in Sephora or The Sharper Image, and practical features like seamless construction and dishwasher-safe cleaning.

Why now? Technology, of course. Not just the whiz-bang glamour of teledildonics or cell-phone vibrators, but the behind-the-scenes business-process applications that are too boring for most sex columnists to write about.

Even if the product itself is low-tech, like the hand-sculpted ceramic dildos from Atraw Ceramics in Rochester, New York, it’s the invisible technologies — shopping carts, order-fulfillment and tracking databases, search-engine optimizers — that make it possible for entrepreneurs to take a chance on something completely different.

And it’s the technology that makes it possible for women to take charge, to speak out about what they want while remaining anonymous, to browse through online stores in complete privacy. Why suffer through a roadside sex shop when you can find something as beautiful as it is functional online? And if you can’t find it, why not make it yourself?

That’s what inspired the husband-and-wife team behind Sounds Erotic, which produces audio erotic stories that help couples “transition easily into the right frame of mind.” You can download the stories through Audible.com or buy them on CD.

And it’s what encouraged Ian Marshall to invent the Rock Chick, a toy that stimulates both the G-spot and the clitoris while keeping everyone’s hands free.

At the risk of being cliché, what’s good for women is good for men. When we’re happy in bed, so are our partners.

The true innovators at this year’s porn convention are the women and couples who take advantage of high-tech to bring pleasure into the bedroom, whether through visual erotica, MP3s or toys that don’t make a man feel like there’s another penis in the room (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

Now if only those titanium vibrators had Bluetooth….