With porn expected to be the third-largest virtual reality market sector within seven years, according to The New York Times, and PornHub reporting a year-on-year 275 percent increase of VR porn views on its site, virtual reality technology appears to shaping up as major driver of growth in the adult industry.
But one roadblock to that growth could turn out to be the United States telecommunications infrastructure, which according to new statistics published by the data site Statista, lags behind competing countries by a significant margin when it comes to developing 5G networks, which experts say are essential to making VR a viable technology for consumers.
“It is a widely understood fact that we cannot welcome AR [i.e. augmented reality] and VR without 5G,” writes Forbes Magazine technology reporter Daniel Newman. “Why is 5G technology so important to AR and VR? ...We haven't seen widespread adoption (of VR) just yet. I firmly believe 5G connectivity will open the floodgates of mass adoption, finally allowing us to use VR and AR to its full capacity.”
5G networks dramatically increase data transmissions speeds, drastically reducing or eliminating lag time and “freezing” when watching VR videos—lags that are more stressful for users when viewing VR video than when viewing regular video downloads, according to Ericsson Comsumer & Industry Lab.
“Our study revealed that network lags in VR were three times more stressful for gamers as compared to playing on a PC,” research by Ericsson found, in a study on video game VR play. “Even with a network latency of 15ms, VR by itself is very cognitively demanding for consumers.”
But according to the numbers published by Statista, while Japan currently has 17.4 5G network sites per every 100,000 people in the country’s population, and China has 14.1 per 100,000, the United States has only 4.7 5G network sites per 100,000 Americans.
Looked at geographically, the U.S. appears even further behind the rest of the world. For every 10 square miles, Japan has 15.2 sites, China 5.3 and Germany 5.1. But for every 10 square miles of U.S. land, there are currently 0.4 5G network sites—making the super-speed networks inaccessible to most Americans who want to use them for video gaming—or porn.
To give an example of the capabilities of 5G, “you could download 20 movies over 5G in the time it takes to download one in 4G from a peak speed perspective,” according to Statista.
Photo By Sergey Galyonkin/Wikimedia Commons
