This article originally ran in the April 2015 issue of AVN magazine. Click here to see the issue online.
While this reporter didn’t attend the Consumer Electronics Show early in January, judging from reports, virtual reality (VR) didn’t make a big splash there, with Oculus, recently acquired by Facebook, having been the main exhibitor devoted to the craft. Still, with Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe noting that the company’s new “Crescent Bay” VR goggles don’t make him “nauseous like previous versions,” and Sony failing to provide a release date for its own “Project Morpheus” goggles for PlayStation, and Samsung claiming to be shooting 360 degree VR for its own fairly expensive goggles, mainstream isn’t exactly rolling out the red carpet for the technology—yet.
Not so with porn.
According to a recent article on Wired.com, “[N]o visual technology has ever been so perfectly suited to sexual applications as VR. Yes, video brought sexually explicit content from theaters into homes, but virtual reality promises to eclipse even that shift. Historically, we’ve found titillation at a remove. In erotic woodcuts, DVDs, even streaming webcam shows, there’s a frame—whether a book, a Polaroid border, or a screen—through which we experience whatever it is that turns us on. VR is more than just another iteration. It doesn’t just change the frame. VR erases it. It allows us to exist inside the environment. The NSFW possibilities are endless. Yes, we’re at the dawn of this thing, and all the easy points of reference—Star Trek’s holodeck, Community’s Dreamatorium, The Matrix—are years of refinement and R&D away. The real question is what we’ll do in Year One.”
This year’s Adult Entertainment Expo saw three exhibitors who were all over VR—and attendees who spent a few minutes wearing the goggles and sampling the offerings likely came away very impressed—even if the technology does still have a way to go.
Most prominent was Red Light Center, the hardcore branch of popular online VR destination Utherverse, both of which were founded by CEO Brian Shuster, who had a few choice words to say about the future of virtual sexual reality.
“We’re really focused right now on getting the new version of our software [Red Light Center 2] out to the public, and letting them know that it’s available now for immediate download and beta testing,” Shuster told AVN. “So for now, it’s attending trade shows and getting the word out in the press, and we’re doing some very, very large integration deals with major studios. There’s so many things that can be done with the virtual worlds software now: Whole new kinds of videos that can be produced; videos that can be navigated through so you can see it from any angle and that type of thing, so you can imagine the sorts of people we’re working with. But it’s not really public yet.”
RedLightCenter.com is Utherverse’s hardcore destination, but in order to fully appreciate its offerings, would-be users will first need Oculus headgear, and they’re not easy to come by, though Shuster noted that if people contact Oculus and claim (hopefully truthfully) to be a VR developer, Oculus will sell them the headgear for about $300.
But even without the headgear, people can still have fun on the Red Light Center website.
“It’s a multi-user world, so everybody in it is available to any user,” Shuster noted. “With the software, it’s $20 a month, and everybody is a live action player: You’re actually giving a lapdance, getting a lapdance, getting a blowjob, the whole shebang. If people don’t have the headgear, they can still become members of Red Light Center; it’s just they won’t have the immersion; they’ll see it on their screen, and it’s still a very fun experience.”
And rest assured, it’s a total 360-degree experience, and those who tested the headgear at the expo were able to see 3D figures—including one of Tera Patrick—having sex whether they looked left or right, and in some cases, even up or down.
Sadly, the one thing that none of the VR programmers we’ve met so far has been able to accomplish is putting images of live human beings into virtual worlds. Instead, performers have sex against a green screen, wearing animation tags so that their movements can be motion-captured and transferred to animated figures (“avatars”) made to resemble the actors, not unlike Hollywood does when it animates characters like Iron Man or the Incredible Hulk.
“With Tera and the other performers that we have, we have an enormous backlog of animations to work through, so we’re working through that,” Shuster stated. “But I’m excited to do things in the BDSM area and in the fetish area, and we’re going to start to expand into threesomes, so within a couple of months, we’re going to start bringing talent up to Vancouver and motion-capture them, and it’s going to be a regular thing.
“One other thing that’s interesting, we’re planning to put together a whole new subscription paradigm that we’re proposing to studios and the talent that we motion-capture, which is, we can capture their signature sex moves and do scenes with them, and offer that to our user base on a subscription base,” Shuster added. “So every month, subscribers will all of a sudden have new sex moves, new blowjob moves that they can perform that are really motion-captured from the talent. It’s a whole new kind of subscription paradigm which can’t be pirated and which I think is going to make some superstars, some talent very superstar-y in the virtual space.”
But while Red Light Center is already five years along in its VR development, AEE also saw a couple of VR start-ups that have announced big plans for immersible porn—like a VR arcade booth.
“We’ve just gotten into the 3D virtual reality, which we think is going to revolutionize the arcade industry that much more,” said Vince Wedelstedt of arcade booth supplier International Amusements. “It’s going to be for the guy who wants to go back there and almost be as if he’s in the room with somebody like Tera Patrick or Bonnie Rotten. I mean, it is going to be right there in their face.”
Wedelstedt said that the company is currently in the middle of trials for its VR-equipped booths, though they’re looking forward to a mid-year rollout of the service to all of their retail accounts. But it won’t be long before the company is creating its own VR products.
“At this point, we’re only doing service with that [VR] right now, mainly to make sure that the glasses are kept up, in good operating condition,” he advised, “because a lot of the movies are going to be proprietary, so we want to make sure that the content keeps getting updated for the new customers. It’s a POV kind of thing. Right now, we’re shooting in 180 degrees. The next step is to go 360 degrees so when you’re standing in a room, you’ll have a view of every single side of you, which opens the door for orgy scenes. The guy can go from one girl to the next everywhere in the room. There can be swinger parties happening. It’ll be bigger than life.”
Wedelstedt’s system expects to use Oculus-style glasses, but another VR start-up exhibitor has a slightly different plan.
“Our company is going to offer content that will stream on the Oculus and the [Samsung Gear] VR, which is new equipment that was featured at the CES convention,” said Blake Blakely of Huccio.com. “What we offer is a 3D streaming device that works with the Samsung Galaxy Note 4—you can buy that on Amazon—or a Google card, which you can buy. If you have your phone connected to the device, you can use your own content as well, but it won’t be in 3D, so the benefits of subscribing to Huccio is that it’s going to be streaming all its content in 3D, so you can have a virtual experience with adult films.”
We’ll say one thing for Huccio: It’s got one of the most impressive VR-devoted websites we’ve seen, and while the service hasn’t officially launched yet—according to Blakely, they’re still working out a few kinks—Huccio plans to offer original content in both monthly and annual subscription models, which they expect to be streeting by mid-2015.
“It’s going to be X-rated films streaming in 3D, so it’s going to be a whole virtual experience,” Blakely said. “We’re currently filming in L.A. with fresh faces, which is nice, so it’s not going to be mediocre content where you might get some not-so-nice-looking girls. We want to get some fresh faces.”
But L.A. and Vancouver aren’t the only places where VR content is currently being filmed. According to the International Business Times, award-winning director and Woodrocket.com founder Lee Roy Myers has spent the past 18 months shooting high-quality VR imagery in Las Vegas—and he’s got some strong opinions about it.
“Especially in an environment of piracy,” said Myers in the article, “people have been less willing to be innovative and make high-risk investments. Since sales are dropping in porn, people have stuck to the tried and tested. But VR isn’t just a novelty; it’s the future of adult entertainment.”
Myers told the Times that he’s created a multi-camera rig that “solved the problem” of shooting porn with a 180 degree viewing field—at least from the male’s point of view.
“People expect VR to be mainly POV porn,” said Myers, “so the viewer feels they’re in the [typically male] position.”
One adult actress who might know something about that is Ela Darling, who besides being the focus of the above-mentioned Wired.com article, was the test subject for some Maryland-based college students who were doing their own VR experiments.
According to Darling, “It was like Weird Science. I met these guys on Reddit, and after a little discussion via email, they agreed to fly me out. One of the guys met me, and we went back to his off-campus apartment where we shot our scene. He’s a friggin’ genius; he’s like a quantum physics major and one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met, and he’s very well versed in virtual reality. We shot on two GoPros which he mounted on the wall.”
The experience led Darling to team up with that on-camera partner to form VRtube.xxx, a VR production company with a proprietary camera set-up that’s already shooting adult actresses and should be ready to roll out its first offerings for the Oculus system shortly, with more viewing platforms to be added later.
“It’s very photo-realistic,” Darling said. “We’re capturing people just from one angle right now, a bit more than 180 degrees, but we’re hoping to expand into 360-degree capture very soon. Right now, we’re doing solo masturbation, with focus on different fetish aspects, so each girl does a solo, then she does a shorter solo where she’s just playing with her tits or pussy or ass, or just playing with her feet, so it’ll be like a package that you can download for each actress.
“We’re not doing girl/girl sex yet, because the field of view doesn’t quite capture as much as I’d like,” she added. “But I may theoretically extend into more girl/girl when my capture space is larger. … Sadly, the software isn’t developing as fast as we need it to, so we’re either going to hire a programmer to give us what we need, or just wait for the person who’s currently working on the software that we love to move it along—because I don’t want to be, like, ‘Hey, can you please hurry up so we can make great porno’ because a lot of people don’t want their stuff connected to porno.”
And in more recent news, apparently even Microsoft will be getting into the VR act, having recently demonstrated its HoloLens headset, which one reviewer described as allowing “interaction with holographic images, enabling people to play video games, build 3-D models and hold immersive videoconferences with colleagues.” (Actually, the images won’t be actual holograms but VR.)
“With the device, HoloLens, Microsoft is entering an increasingly crowded area, with giant competitors, in the world of virtual and augmented reality,” noted reviewer Nick Wingfield. “Whether Microsoft can outmaneuver those companies, like Facebook and Google, is far from guaranteed.”
But rest assured, whatever they do come up with, if it can be adapted for hardcore content, the adult industry will be ready for it!
Above, Red Light Center's booth at AEE; photo by JFK/FUBARwebmasters.com
