Can Oculus Save The Porn Industry?

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It’s barely been a month since Facebook acquired Oculus for two billion dollars and already we’re seeing the kind of new world order type shit that film makers and directors will be able to do with it.

VFX master Charles Howell of Gravity fame recently remarked how excited he was by the burgeoning visual effects industry and the huge potential it offered for immersive cinema.

So naturally, this has huge implications for porn. Unironically the porn industry has been pretty ahead of the curve on virtual reality software. Type the term “VR porn” into Google and you’ll find a staggering number of companies offering immersive boning. The fetishes range from real time engagement to 3D animation. The quality though, naturally, ranges.

One man who is excited about the potential Oculus presents for the industry is Virtual Reality Pornographer Frank Asimo. He is behind Xmoons, a VR porno game which allows gamers to chat with “girls” through a public dating site which once you have earned the trust of an artificially intelligent sex goddess, “you can take things to the next level” he explains, after which time they become your “love toy for life”.

The website does take a slightly different approach, encouraging users “not to rush things,” and “not to force it”. Although once gamers “win over” their slaves they can do literally anything they want with them.

“If you want to come on her face, just make it happen,” the website reads. “Peek inside bikinis, pull down dresses, it’s all possible.” Fantastic.

Even more intense though, the characters in the game have actual feelings. So though you can control them, “they may resist if being handled too roughly”.

Imagine the potential for ecstasy/disaster presented by Oculus, especially considering that the ability to stream and/or record your immediate environment via Oculus already exists. As terrifying as it reads, it’s probably safer keeping these types at home where they belong and not out around the general public—thank you Internet.

“OR and webcam real time online sex does have large potential,” Asimo said. “This is where a lot of adult entertainers make their money now. And also for watching videos it has added value, and of course adult gaming.

“So it could certainly give a boost to a lot of elements the adult industry is busy in.”

However Asimo also admits Oculus wouldn’t be the “solution” for the porn industry. Sadly the industry helped spawn its own demise. The world wouldn’t have YouTube if porn wasn’t doing it first. Unfortunately the value of pornography has massively dropped just due to the sheer volume of free porn content flooding the web.

“But piracy is also here to stay I think. But what would help greatly was if digital game store, Steam would create an environment that housed adult content. “That would help a lot,” the VR pornographer notes.

Asimo believes Steam’s anti piracy policy could help incentivise people to pay for porn again. Steam basically threatens to take away your games if you try to hack the system to mod games or pirate content.

“When you have pirated Steam software you can be banned, meaning all your games you have bought through Steam are not accessible,” he says.

“So you are either using Steam, or not. I think adult gaming and video should have a similar model. But now the studios, much like non-adult studios are not working together.”

I caught up with the GM of Intel’s cloud services platform Peter Biddle who had some remarkably candid things to say about what Oculus could do for the adult industry,

Biddle was one of the major people involved in an acquisition for the company years ago, whose sole purpose was, in his words, “to basically have to do 10 things, in no particular order, to make the virtual reality dream come true”. That program may since have been abandoned, he notes.

“One of the reasons VR has been such a flop so far frankly is because people have assumed you would wear glasses in order to see something that’s fake or doesn’t exist—a virtual world—I think that’s wrong,” he said.

“I think one of the reason’s Glass is interesting—although Google’s business model make it pretty obvious what they want to do with it, right—is it lets it now do trans-reality mash-ups between what your eyeballs are taking in as reality as real or somehow different or skew.

“You can really disappear down a porn or sex rabbit hole related to Oculus or Google Glass when we can start imposing our own desires for the visual elements on an interaction onto other things, meaning we could decide we really want to make out with Angelina Jolie and impose that.”

Biddle joked it was like the “brown bag effect” writ large.

“Instead of Coyote Ugly now you have Oculus Ugly,” he said.

In actual fact the technology Biddle speaks of already exists, sort of.

Bubbli is an iPhone app that allows you to create an app of “dynamic spherical photos called bubbles”. That’s PR speak for you can literally map the room or street you stand in into a spherical image which rotates as you move your phone. You can look up and see the sky, look down and see the carpet, look left, right etc.

While this is just a fantastic photo app, there’s no reason the same technology couldn’t be used to graph real world simulators that allow you to talk to real people in real environments in real time, while wearing the Oculus.

You could presumably use the same technology for engagement, and for mapping real world experiences to record for later. You could create a “bubble” of the Playboy mansion and have a virtual play-date inside Hugh Hefner’s house!

So yes, it seems there is some huge potential for some very creepy virtual reality fantasy content on the Oculus and the

But all of this hinges on whether Oculus will allow developers to create adult content and gaming platforms on the device. And now that the company has been acquired by Facebook, that decision is up to one man—Mark Zuckerberg.

VICE reached out to Oculus for comment however a spokesperson for the company said it was “not conducting any interviews at this time” and that the team is “heads down developing the Oculus Rift”.

We also contacted Facebook to find out if it has any intention of restricting adult content on the platform and to beg Mark Zuckerberg to let us have our porn, but neither he or the company have responded.

Follow Claire on Twitter: @ClaireRPorter