Overview on The Emerging VR Sex& Entertainment Industry
Time has seen the adult entertainment industry evolve with technology and even seeing the industry being the pioneers in embracing online payments and to offer live-cam and live video streaming. The impact that adult industry has made upon the digital world can seem to be endless. But most recently, the adult industry has take the virtual reality world by storm, as being one of the first notable industries to adopt virtual reality equipment and start monetizing.
But unlike other previous occasion with this new step come challenges that the adult entertainment industry must involve itself with emerging virtual reality technologies.
However, pornography is not well received in the world of technology and investors are very much worried about their public image when they decide to invest in it. This is not something new to adult entertainment industries since even banks a number of times have denied them opportunity to get loans as they consider this acquaintance to be of high risk clients and because of such events, it has been easier said than done to keep up with the competition coming from the developers of unadulterated VR around the world.
The VR Porn and adult entertainment industry’s pioneers though decided to never take no for an answer, they are pushing forward and creating new and cost-efficient technologies and reinventing models of monetization. According to WIRED, it is easy to understand why basically there are no major steps that have been made to perfectly suit sexual applications such as VR, a dimension that calls for intimacy and immersion.
Ela Darlin – Launched VRTubeXXX
Ela Darlin, a former librarian who turned award winning VR porn-star, a true VR porn pioneer and industry activist explains the experience with VR as an experience like no other. It gives you the feeling that you are in that room with the person in the VR where you can actually talk to them and even having sex with them. The actors really have to initiate the whole act and ensure that you are real to the users and not a toy on the screen for fucking.
In the year 2014, after coming across a post on Reddit that was written by an associate of James Ashfield, a juvenile developer who was searching intensively for models who would be in a shoot, Ela Darling ventured into the VR space and in a few months she met James Ashfield after flying to Baltimore and the two instantly came together to start VRTube.xxx. As of today, this website has earned recognition as being a pioneer in offering adult content captured in 3D for both 180 and 360-degree, live VR cam streaming and not to forget holographic VR. According to Darling, the duo became a perfect match in an industry that seems to be progressing so fast. Darling has so far launched Cam4 VR from April 2016, an adult site that offers live performances in VR.
When you view Virtual Reality as a medium in the tech-world today, it will be easy for you to consider its development rate as very sluggish since only a few companies are producing content for both commercial and advertisement purposes only and that is apart from its aspect of entertainment and gaming.
One of the reasons behind this staggering development is owed to the fact that the gadget has not yet been made fully accessible to every user since you can afford one from Google, HTC or Samsung but even with this, their potential is very limited when it comes to showing the true potentials of this headset. An example of limitation set by these available gadgets is they have latency approximate of 75ms of higher; and this has been known to cause nausea; while the GearVR can achieve approximately 20ms but this is limited only to Samsung smartphones and the various VR apps and this in general the overall quality and image resolution.
With the release of Oculus Rift in spring, all these could change as it is able to achieve latency that is incredibly low at a significantly high resolution and it also has improved field view which is a vital factor when it comes to immersion. Oculus has so far joined with companies like Dell, Asus, and developed support aimed at promoting Xbox One games. The dealer breaker here though is the price which is $599.
With the adult entertainment VR content the main issue has been with the playback since in previous years, you could just download porn via P2P clients like LimeWire. Though the catch here was that you had to patient and wait for the download to finish then embrace the fact that you might have just downloaded a virus or a malware to your computer. But today, the safest way to enjoy porn is via online streaming services like YouPorn or PornHub.
When it comes to VR porn that is pre-recorded, a number of current platforms will require you download the desired videos together with a player for you to be able to enjoy the content. This is inopportune in terms of storage capacity and can be deemed to be a backward step from the online streaming services. Good news though is that there are companies that are already dedicated to enhance this service.
All about the VR Innovation
VR Innovation is a software developing company that offers the ability to stream 180 and 360-degree videos to website owners, both on PCs and mobile devices. ViRP which is one of VR platforms targets the adult entertainment industry and it is the first of its kind to offer playback of 3D videos in web browsers with head tracking. This though was discontinued and the company launched its official VR Player. John Clagg, a lead developer of ViRP mentioned that adult entertainment industry are going to be pioneers when it comes to production of the VR video content, plus so far right now they have a huge collection of the VR content, indeed larger than any other industry. This is a trend is presumed to always be existing. In comparison to other industries, the adult VR content is currently the only industry that truly monetizes VR videos.
The monetization structure is subscription-based on most of the adult VR websites while for the VR cams they are pay-by-the-minute. So far VRTube offers its users the option to purchase video on demand scenes a la carte. To continue saturating the marketing, the pioneer duo, Darling and Ashfield seem to be creating an original system that will allow others to sell their contents of VR webcam. Using software that was released in July 2015, all the performers are now given choice to concurrently cam in VR, 2D, and 3D when in a traditional session of cam stream. The performers now also have a choice of recording their acts using the BR camera that is offered by the VRTube and later sell them. According to Darling, they are planning to scale up these cameras that go for $250 and with the upgrade; they will even come at a cheaper price.
The reason for this expensive cost of the camera is because the adult industry market currently is not strong to be supporting webcamming in VR. It is because of this setback that Darling and her team created this system so that it can allow both options, and this will give performers a much larger ground of selling their work.
When it comes to bigger production houses where the operation cost ranges from $3000 to $5000 the camera set-up is often GoPro lenses. The President of HoloGirlsVR Anna Lee explains that cannot be considered to be efficient yet since it limits adjusting of lenses once the set-up is put in place and also the GoPro lenses often underperform in shifting focus and low light.
Maybe the biggest challenge lies on the performers since VR is mostly captured in only one shot and this is because cuts often disrupt the scene’s immersion and the problem of the performers is that they are called to perform as long as the shooting is taking place and not to only shoot when the actors perform. “It is impossible to reset and the back up like five minutes—it never works in such a manner. It is the anatomy and physiology of people that you are working with, and it is vital to take such aspects into account.” explains Lee.
What about the Impact
Every single day this market is growing and it is because the outliers in adult entertainment are constantly improving the VR industry and VR is becoming more accessible while porn companies are constantly releasing content. While this new innovation seems to be pretty remarkable, it is important to understand how it is in real sense affecting the users. This step can lead to dysfunctional relationships as people will become more porn addicts with symptoms such as sexual dysfunction and hormonal changes.
In extreme cases it can result to loneliness and depression by having the powerlessness to get aroused. According to Alexander Rhoades, of the NoFap, porn addiction is a silent plague that is affecting the world that has an easy access to internet porn and it is non-discriminatory. Alexander Rhodes believes that the VR in collaboration with adult entertainment industry will definitely increase the rate of porn addiction due its realistic qualities. This though is quite contrary to what Darling believes, she sees that VR porn has the capability of improving people’s sexual health without having an access to intimacy.
