LOS ANGELES—As this is written, the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) is in full swing, featuring at least 250 exhibitors with such recognizable names as Nintendo, Samsung, Sony, Oculus, Microsoft—and one, count 'em, one adult company: Naughty America.
"They have us off in this tiny little booth in the corner, and we're rockin' it," chuckled Naughty America spokesman Ian Paul. "We've been busy non-stop. In fact, last night, security had to come, after they had announced that the convention was closed, and say 'Okay, you have to leave now,' because people just kept queuing up. Isn't that funny?"
Indeed; even in its corner near the back of South Hall, where the smaller exhibitors are clustered, Naughty America stands out with at least 50 people crowding in to get a taste of the company's hardcore VR product, while the rest of the booths in the area are experiencing... <crickets>.
But of course, E3 is largely a gamers' convention, so how does Paul explain Naughty America's popularity?
"This is a huge topic culturally, not just in adult," he assessed, "and we're a big part of people's daily lives, whether they want to admit it or not; people look at a lot of porn."
"After all," he added, "VR had its birth in the gaming industry, and though we use live models rather than computer-generated avatars or anything like that, these young gamers aren't thrown by that at all; they love it."
Among the actresses featured in the abbreviated scenes that Naughty America is displaying at its booth are Nikki Benz, Ava Addams, Julia Ann, Jessa Rhodes, Kayla Kayden, Mia Malkova, Bridgette B, Kendra Lust, August Ames and Leah Gotti.
"A lot of the newer girls are very popular," Paul said, "but of course, MILF has always been a popular genre as well. I think we started 'My Friend's Hot Mom' in 2003, roughly, and that's kind of what helped put us on the map, and now of course with VR, it's ushering in a new generation of millennials. So along with that comes the younger girls, so we've been shooting them in VR as well, so we have a nice balance of MILF/mature and then bordering on 18-, 19-, 20-year-olds as well."
Asked about the future, Paul revealed that the company will soon be rolling out a new site called Real Teens VR. "It's going to be a teen-oriented VR separate from the Naughty America brand, and that should be exciting."
And what about a Naughty America VR full-length feature? "Well, all of our scenes, which are vignettes, run 45 minutes," Paul noted, "so we don't currently have plans to expand on that."
Everything on display at the expo is boy/girl oriented, so we asked if the company has any plans for other genres?
"We don't actually have any girl/girl yet," noted Lauren, Paul's associate. "We're not opposed to having it. We do have a demo that we've made from the woman's point of view, though, which is pretty interesting. The woman's point of view would be, the woman is the viewer, so it shows the woman being penetrated by a man, so for a woman who wants to watch pornography, we have virtual reality so she can go ahead and watch it from her point of view. That's not on our site yet, but it will be soon."
And how about porn for gay males?
"Certainly that's something we're looking into," Paul said. "We haven't announced anything quite yet, though."
As far as adult goes, that's about it for E3—though we did spot a couple of booths featuring products that can easily be adapted to adult VR—like the new headset at the Zeiss Opticals booth.
"Everybody always asks, 'Why is Zeiss involved in VR?'" asked Zeiss's Annette Tindall rhetorically. "But virtual reality experience really is all about the visual experience, about the optics, which makes Zeiss the perfect partner for this because Zeiss has been in the optics business for over 160 years, so we certainly understand what a lens has to look like for it to be effective—and the special art of our VR headset is the lens design.
"Most lenses have a conical shape to them, which give you a very narrow focal point," she continued. "We've actually redesigned our lens; we've flatted our lens so we now have a focal plane, and what that does is, it means we no longer have to do IPD [inter-pupilliary distance] adjustments for the viewer; it also gives us a very clear field of view all the way out to the margins of the picture, so you don't get any of the fuzziness that you get with some of the other headsets on the market, so that's a real advantage for us.
"The other thing that we've really done with this headset that makes it so unique is, we've widened the eyebox and we've moved the optics a little bit away from the user so for our users that wear corrective lenses, they no longer have to remove their glasses; they just wear their own prescription lenses, which is going to give them the best correction for their vision. So now, we have a product that has no IPD adjustment, we don't have to adjust for vision.
"The other thing that we've done with this product is, we have no electronics on board," she noted. "The advantage of that for us is that makes us 'smartphone agnostic,' if you will; we're not tied to any particular phone. We can take any phone that has a screen size between 4.7 and 5.5 inches in screen display."
The Zeiss headset will be available in August, first from the company's "product launch partner," Best Buy Electronics, but soon afterwards, it will be available from any retailer that stocks Zeiss products. The suggested retail price for the headset will be $129.
Finally, we were amused to see the 3DRudder, a movable disk that rests on the floor, and which its salesman, Stan Chesnais, describes as "a fixed-base VR motion controller."
"Basically it's a device you use while seated," he continued, "so you rest your feet on the device and by tilting the device forward, you move forward in the game, so you can move forward, backward; strafe to the right, to the left; you can rotate to the right and to the left, and you can go up and down, so you can basically fly or move in any direction you want and in any way you want; total freedom in VR."
Though 3DRudder is clearly meant for the gaming community, Chesnais sees the possibility that it could be adapted to help viewers move around in VR scenes without the need for the user to turn his/her head—which, with a 360-degree scene, might prove a bit difficult.
"If the movie was designed for use with the 3DRudder, yes, you could use it to turn around in the movie and look to the side. The key thing about the device is, you can use it with existing games, existing content; you can use it with apps like Google Earth, just to fly in Google Earth. So it's not VR, it's Google Earth but it works as well, so there are many other things than VR to use it. It's a new interface; it's a new way of controlling your movements or controlling where you're heading in a game or in an application."
The device retails for $179, and can be found on the company's website, 3DRudder.com, and while this may seem to be mainly an overpriced joystick, its applications to adult VR—or adult gaming—hav real possibilities that future developers may want to incorporate.
