The Looming VR Revolution™ may not completely change the world, but it at least promises to change how we think about video games and porn.
Here at Kotaku we’ve played plenty of VR games, and some on our staff have tried out various types of VR Porn. The games are generally cool; the porn is actually pretty wild and startling in unexpected ways.
This latest video from Buzzfeed Blue isn’t that different from similar videos we’ve seen in the past, but it’s still fun to watch people deal with the fact that there are porn stars within inches of their virtual selves.
I’m struck by the way some of these folks recoil as the actors draw near. When my colleague Nathan Grayson tried out a similar thing last year, he had the following to say:
She got close. Really close. If she were a real person, we’d have been nose-to-nose. It was weirdly uncomfortable. My brain — only partially aware that what it was experiencing wasn’t real — surged its synapses with mixed signals, ones usually reserved for awkward encounters with actual humans. “Who is this person? You just met her. Why is she right in your face? Please step back please step back please step back she’s not stepping back. Why can’t you step back?” I could count the moments of eye contact in eternities, it felt so awkward.
That awkwardness is the thing I think a lot of people aren’t quite expecting when it comes to this. We think “VR Porn” and immediately think, OK, cool, virtual sex with a porn star. I’m getting the sense we don’t fully account for how startling that kind of simulated intimacy can really be.
Comments
16 responses to “Watch People Lose Their Shit Trying Out VR Porn”
Dont bother watching, its all censored
And it’s BuzzFeed….Blue? Blue? What the fuck
“Porno and Gaming is what it is made for”.. oh boy.. and here is me thinking I can’t wait till we can have full 3D experiences of hollywood movies, particularly sci-fi movies.
Misread your comment, disregard.
Bloody hell it’s only Monday and already:
“Crapping oneself during games”
“Losing shit trying VR out”
“Titanfall”
“Fallout”
Can we maybe get an article about “Downwell” if we are sticking to a theme 😀
MORE THAN 1080P! IT HAD ALL THE P’s!
That dude was gold!
I’m not really a porn watching guy…..I don’t watch porn for the same reason I don’t watch sports, why watch other people have fun……however I too will check out VR porn at the first available moment…….just for no other reason but to say I’ve seen it.
When you have a partner who works away you got to keep entertained somehow.
I’m not watching other people have fun. I’m watching other people pretend to be me.
C’mon Kirk, don’t be coy. The internet promises not to judge you.
Watching a movie isn’t VR. This doesn’t have the 6-DOF, it’s just a panoramic video on a HMD. If it was VR, then you could move away when they got too close. It’s about as VR as IMAX.
It wouldn’t be too difficult to do 3 degrees of freedom with binocular vision for this kind of thing though. If they captured 360° video together with a depth map, it’d be possible to do a reasonable job synthesising the two images for binocular vision for whatever direction the user’s head is facing.
Whether they’re actually doing that kind of thing is another matter.
Paid actors anyone?
Or I dunno, it wouldn’t be useful for military, medical and simulation in other fields at all.
It wouldn’t be useful for real-estate or house and building planning, nope.
It wouldn’t be useful for scientific research, never.
It is only made for games and porn, nothing else, nope. Gosh people are weirdly short-sighted sometimes. And the problem is they are continuing to give the technology a bad rep by doing this sort of stuff. VR is being made in this initial stage primarily for gaming, yes. (Porn is something of a sideshow for it, that is in no way a focus. But its porn, so everyone likes to point it out and make a deal over it.) However the applications beyond gaming are much wider and immediately obvious.
As for VR movies. I doubt they would come out of Hollywood any time soon. It requires too far of a different setup to the Hollywood film. The entire dynamic of the film changes, as to do it properly you would really need to make the film participatory. In that sense it essentially becomes a game, or indeed a “walking simulator” as the closest game genre to what a VR film would likely turn out as.
Luckily they’re already doing a lot of cool stuff in other fields 🙂 http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2015/10/how-virtual-reality-declared-war-on-ptsd/
(Though unfortunately VR porn will probably be a lot more widely read about)