LAS VEGAS – Depending on whose recently-published perspective on VR porn you read, you will be told VR porn is either a highly addictive existential threat to humanity which is rapidly gaining steam, or kind of an overhyped dud.
Since I’m inherently more interested in (and, frankly, supportive of) things which could wipe out humanity than I am slight enhancements to my masturbation habits, let’s start with the existential threat perspective and round back to the cyber-meh later.
“VR porn is going to change a generation,” says Robert Weiss, author of Sex Addition 101, a book which, among other things, has a subtitle so ridiculously long, no article which quotes Weiss ever includes it.
“The people creating the tech have said that they think people will end up having virtual sex before they go on a date,” Weiss adds. “The whole development of relationships and connection and sexuality – and the organization and order of it all – is all getting tossed up in the air.”
This is indeed scary stuff, because as anybody who works in the online porn industry (or any other tech-related industry) knows, if there’s one group of people whose forecast for the immense impact and importance of tech products we should pay attention to and rely on as totally accurate and unerringly prescient, it’s the people manufacturing and marketing those products.
Weiss isn’t done freaking us the fuck out though, because there’s a bigger threat lurking out there than immersive, 3D virtual porn: immersive, 3D VR camming.
“When VR camming starts, we’re going to lose thousands and thousands of people to it,” Weiss warns. “And it’s only a couple of years away.”
Ho. Lee. Fuck. I haven’t been this frightened by a tech prediction since I heard Skynet is going to become self-aware on August 4, 1998!
“When you sit there and you face that person, and they are loving, warm, sexy and engaging – and you’re not looking at a screen, you feel like you’re with them,” Weiss says, “that’s going to be the game changer. Everything we’re seeing now, in my 25 years of experience, is going to be nothing compared to what happens when VR really rolls out in the next few years.”
I’m not sure why having my head stuck in a half-bucket with cables hanging off it is going to be less intrusive and more real-feeling than video-chatting with the same woman in two dimensions on my PC’s monitor – but I’ve never written a book with a 47-word subtitle either, so I’ll defer to Weiss’ expertise.
“I used to work with men who had phone sex problems,” Weiss adds, explaining where some of his expertise came from. “They would spend hour after hour on the phone, spending £3.99 a minute all to get some woman to say ‘I want you.’ Men like that, when they find themselves facing someone in VR, they’re never going to leave that room. They will spend fortunes.”
Hmm. I’m not saying Weiss is overstating his case, but I am saying if VR camming-hooked guys truly never leave the room, they’re going to get very hungry, smelly and piss-soaked within a few days, tops. Honestly, about a week in to their experience, I’d say the money they’re spending is going to be the least of their problems.
While Weiss offers a chilling vision of a very near (and quite pungent) future, Scott Stein of Cnet has a slightly different take on VR porn.
“There’s something of a showman’s attitude to adult video companies that makes me feel like what’s being touted is half-real, half-publicity stunt,” Stein writes.
No shit?
“While AR apps on phones can be impressive at first, my experience with them tends to be that they’re short-lived novelties,” Stein adds. “Is AR the new hot thing after VR for adult entertainment… or just the latest trick at a tech show full of illusions? If the demo is any indication, it seems more like an advertisement than an immersive experience.”
I suppose Stein’s take on Naughty America’s AR demo doesn’t preclude the possibility of the VR pornocalypse predicted by Weiss. Maybe the truth is somewhere in between the two.
That’s right: two to three years from now, thousands of men will be lost to mildly novel, titillating-but-not-pornographic AR-driven advertisements displayed on their smartphones.
Never let it be said we weren’t warned.
