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I Needed Help From Tech Support to Watch VR Porn

This is a whole lot of effort to just, you know.
Image: Dorcel Media

Back in my day you never needed to call tech support when you wanted to look at some naked humans in Playboy.

A popular French adult film producer, Marc Dorcel, this week released his first swath of VR videos. Their release is newsworthy not so much because VR porn is novel—there are already companies like Badoink that specialize in it—but because Dorcel's support is seen as a kind of instant legitimization of the new format.

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"Being the very first [to VR porn] was not our goal," a Dorcel Media executive told Euronews in early October. "We were rather aiming for a sleek final product. We first thought about going public last April, but we had to push back [the launch]."

Unfortunately for me, it took a couple tech support emails and innumerable Google searches just to get the thing to work correctly.

Motherboard still has the Gear VR and accompanying Galaxy S6 on loan from Samsung. While I had zero technical issues watching the Democratic debate earlier this month in VR with this setup, I at first could not get Dorcel's provided video file to work in the Oculus Video app. Instead of seeing a simulated 360 video, I instead merely saw two instances of the video stacked upon itself, like this:

Which is not exactly erotic (though those two young ladies do look like they're having fun in the corner there).

After reading and rereading Dorcel's tech support emails, I found the answer to my VR porn problems in the support section of a website called VirtualRealPorn.com, which is not a sentence I expected to write when I woke up this morning. Turns out I had to create a new folder inside the Galaxy S6's file system called "Oculus\360Videos," transfer the video file there, and then open it in the Oculus 360 Videos app. Then and only then did everything work correctly, looking something like this:

Image: Nicholas Deleon

Bonjour, madame!

So what was the experience like? I think odd, mostly. There's no question that it's decidedly more immersive than watching one of those streaming tube sites, with the visual sensation of the actors being pretty much smashed against your face; your entire field of vision, even as you swivel your head in all directions, is enveloped in content. But at the same time, it's hard to ignore the fact that you're wearing a goofy and generally uncomfortable headset the whole time. Worse, my glasses, which barely fit into the headset in the first place, got all smudged in the process. And at one point the phone even crashed because it got too hot…

Too hot for VR, that is.

Ultimately, my feelings are mixed. I think this kind of content is genuinely a better use of virtual reality as a platform than the Democratic debate because it's more transformative: I don't quite think I'm going to hang out with a French maid anytime soon (putting aside the fact that I'm happily in a relationship, thanks), while I have, in fact, seen debates in an auditorium in real life before. At the same time, I do think the technology is still a little too clunky for mainstream acceptance—I wouldn't want to mess with Android's file system and create folders and transfer files when the mood hits.

But hey, it worked! Which is more than I thought I was going to be able to say when I began this journey.