CHICAGO – As compelling as the idea of a pornographic experience in an immersive 3D environment might be on its face, unless a porn producer can provide or generate the right setting, the whole scene and user experience may fall short.

Each of the VR porn demos I’ve tried to date, for example, has used a relatively featureless hotel room or personality-free bedroom for its setting. These places have not been without their charms, but for a lot of customers, such locales are going to come up short of fulfilling their more sordid fantasies.

Thankfully, a new company has come along to offer VR porn viewers detailed, immersive backdrops with more character, more depth and a lot more detritus.

“Our production team spent months literally on its hands and knees, prowling some of America’s dankest, sketchiest back alleys to create environments that will resonate with VR porn viewers who have a hankering for an authentic street prostitution experience, without the risk of falling prey to a vice squad sting,” said Josh Katz, chief executive officer for AlleyKatz VR. “From the shattered heroin vials of Baltimore to the hot dog remnants strewn about the roadways near Chicago’s Wrigley Field, you can almost smell or even cut yourself on the various urban flotsam as you indulge in the pleasures offered by virtual crack-whores and cyber-hookers.”

While anyone can offer viewers the antiseptic confines of a ritzy hotel room, Katz said thus far only his firm has been intrepid enough to plumb the “seedier side” of virtual porn.

“We wanted our productions to be completely authentic, right down to the track marks on the working girls’ arms,” Katz said. “That’s why you won’t see any recognizable porn performers in our VR videos; we’re all-in on realism. Plus, generally speaking, toothless, drug-addicted street hookers tend to work cheaper than porn chicks, because even porn chicks who escort on the side are often reticent to blow someone in broad daylight on a Tuesday morning.”

Katz said he chose to base his company in Chicago not because of the abundance of working girls in the sprawling metropolis, but because nearly 2,000 miles of alleys and small side streets run through the Windy City.

“Back in the day, alleys were an important part of providing necessary services to Chicago’s residents, because alleys were where the trash was collected, heating coal was delivered and human waste was stowed until it could be dumped into a nearby river or lake,” Katz said. “Alleys are no less important to Chicago today, because urban communities still need places to shoot up, deliver and receive handjobs, and abandon their family pets.”

While Katz is clearly fond of Chicago, the feeling isn’t mutual for some of the city’s residents, including those who call its alleys home.

“What that crazy white boy doing up in here with all them young bitches, it just ain’t right,” said Donnell Wilkins, a homeless man who has been camping out in the Englewood area for as long as he can remember. “They making porn without a permit and shit, not letting locals take a ride on even one of them bitches, even if you can afford it. It’s more of that ‘gentrifying’ shit, if you ask me. Bunch of rich white folk driving up the price of pussy in an area which already be pussy-deprived as shit.”

Other critics say they take exception to the way Katz’s productions will reflect on Chicago and other cities in which his firm has chosen to shoot.

“The last thing we need is for Chicago to develop a reputation as the virtual-hooker capital of America,” said Jennifer Julius, who chairs the Sociology Department at Chicago’s Bess Truman University. “Well, actually the last thing we needed was to develop a reputation as a place where cops routinely shoot unarmed African-American children, but since we’ve already acquired such a reputation, the new last thing we need to develop a reputation for is definitely the cyber-hooker VR porn thing.”

Katz said he’s “not looking to redefine Chicago, just the virtual porn experience.”

“At the end of the day, we’ll go wherever there are filthy, trash-strewn alleys, because that’s what gets our customers hot,” Katz said. “If I thought people would be aroused by art museums or things of that nature, we’d be shooting inside the Adler Planetarium — not parked just up Solidarity Drive a few blocks from the Adler, using the hood of a 2001 Monte Carlo as a bed.”