How VR Porn Enchanted the Guy Behind Call of Duty’s Roman Wars Prototype
Before venturing into the making of porn apps for VR, Daniel Dilallo was better known to work on high-end console games such as Call of Duty and Guitar Hero. This career shift is rather unsurprising considering that many other developers are jumping ship. The transition has unveiled fresh opportunities and a chance to make it big in the technological world, which holds prospects of great riches and where everything is on the fast lane. Tech advisor, Digi-Capital projects the value of the VR industry to hit $30 billion by 2020. However, Dilallo has had to shed some of his past as adult entertainment does not enjoy an equal measure of legitimacy in many quarters as the game industry.
Dilallo is stationed in Jacksonville, Florida from where he operates 3x Studios that deals in VR apps. His current projects include a Virtual Reality Porn version of the Gold Club strip club in San Francisco and a 3D-animated shopping mall for porn. You can tour the virtual strip club and enjoy lap dances that mimic the real stuff. Although no actual humans sit on your lap, the sensation is very immersive in VR.
Initially preferring medical VR for its capacity to assist people, Dilallo admits that his entry into adult VR was largely driven by financial constraints. After developing a number of prototypes in the medical space, Dilallo was unable to source enough funds from venture capital groups to maintain his team, who he states were highly trained and valuable, and so had to explore other options. Dilallo’s designs combine game development and film production. He managed to make do with a couple of VR projects and random development stuff in virtual reality marketing. At the time, the adult space was the fastest moving and Dilallo reckons that the adult space is indeed the driver of technology.
My first meeting with Dilallo was at a VR meet up at The Armory, the famed San Francisco landmark currently owned by Kink.com owner, Peter Acworth. In attendance were a dozen of other companies that work on VR porn. The Armory courts controversy: it stocks tons of bondage props in the basement and stores barrels of lubricants. Dilallo has had an opportunity to film there. I would never have expected to meet so much game developers there.
Dilallo had a rather circuitous path to porn. He does not exactly strike the image of a video game developer at a huge corporation. He is covered in tattoos and he relishes cage fighting. He also enjoys the night club ambience and frequents gentlemen’s clubs.
His passion for combining games and film goes way back. He began by serving a one and a half year stint at Acclaim Entertainment as a tester. He then proceeded to Full Sail University, Florida where he graduated with a degree in computer engineering. Thereafter, he immediately took up a job at Activision at a studio in Albany, New York and served as a mission designer for an Amazing Spider-Man video game.
Dilallo admits to having always wanted to be a game director. He pursued engineering to make him a smart director who understands the different disciplines in a game and the effect of his decisions on them. Between 2006 and 2011, Dilallo worked under an Activision-owned studio called Vicarious Visions. He proceeded to work on tools for Guitar Hero III, audio designed on Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2, handled game design on Spyro before moving to the innovations lab where he worked on two Guitar Hero and Call of Duty prototypes.
Call of Duty: Roman Wars
This summer, Dilallo basked under surprise fame, albeit under the nickname “Polemos”. He let it out to sites such as Games Radar that he had began working on a combat game set in ancient Rome before joining Activision. He penned the tale of Julius Caesar’s 10th Roman Legion while in college and proposed a game called Call of Duty: Roman Wars while working at Vicarious Visions. He led the design team for the game which featured combat akin to one witnessed in the movie 300. Dilallo’s prototype also featured scenes with loud music and captured the part where Caesar surrounded the city of Alesia in 52 B.C.
The game proposal picked momentum within the studio in 2010 and several co-workers began spending their off hours on the project as they believed in it. However, as former Activision head of studios and current Infinity Ward head, Dave Stoll put it, the project did not receive the green light, an assertion that Dilallo acknowledges. Vicarious Visions currently focuses on Skylanders series.
Despite Dilallo’s spirited championing for the project that involved meeting with everybody in the Vicarious chain, the project failed to see the light of day. The company instead opted for the futuristic Call of Duty games and the Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. Dilallo attributes this to the poor timing for the project as the period was occasioned by the merger of Activision and Blizzard and the subsequent expansion to several studios.
Guitar Hero Live
In his own time, Dilallo worked a new version of Guitar Hero where he sought to change the music sim’s viewpoint from third person to first person such that the user plays the guitar as part of a band overlooking an audience and relishing in the noise and cheers of the charged revelers. Although the audience was filmed, their reactions appeared more like interactive animations.
But he decided to exit the company in 2011 before the project came to fruition. He had the option of either taking severance or working on Call of Duty. He opted to take severance while acknowledging how adversely his work had affected his family life; his work had occupied his entire time and he barely had time for family.
Activision placed Guitar Hero on hold for some time as the publisher and others populated the games market with plastic musical instruments. Later in 2015, Activision revived and released the project as Guitar Hero Live but, sadly, lent no credit to Dilallo even as it handed the works to Freestyle Games.
Dilallo recognizes the competitive and demanding nature of game development and likens it to professional gaming or designing where one is required to work every single day. He literally committed all his time to work, working on weekends and off hours and was advised severally to take a break. So when the chance to take a severance came a long, he grabbed it.
On taking severance, Dilallo reverted to his dream of combining games and films. Dilallo reveals that he had nurtured this dream since the early 1990s when he first interacted with the Sega CD that made it possible for developers to merge games and film. Ever since, his vision had been to develop a completely interactive video where the user is the hero rather than where the user watches the hero.
Moving into Virtual Reality & Immersive Porn
At the time, Dilallo considered his options and became thrilled at the idea of virtual reality as a new area of video games. Following the bubbling up of Oculus Rift in 2013 and Oculus VR’s issuance of its development kit (DK1), Dilallo toyed with the idea and was convinced that it would hit big.
Guide on How to Watch Virtual Reality Adult Film
He mobilized a small group, although work was not forthcoming. One of his business partners was able to secure a VR prototype job with Playboy which attracted lots of attention during the user testing stage. Dilallo could tell from the reactions of the masses that the market would be bigger. Everyone was crazy about the project.
Some years ago, he realized the potential of adult entertainment projects to generate loads of cash. Dilallo worked on Temptation Towers which entailed partnerships with Muscle Girl Fitness, BadoinkVR, KinkVR and others. The project was like a shopping mall for adult film. The VR headset lets you into a room then into a porn video which you get to watch from a first-person point of view. Temptation Towers is live and accessible via places such as BadoinkVR .
The videos have an interactive feel and they allow the user to reach out to the actress and undress her. It is this type of technology that has been the focus of Dilallo’s work for the last 10 years. Dilallo has also worked with Jimmy Hess on a title dubbed VixenVR under the company, ModeVR. In VixenVR, the user hangs out with a bunch of pretty girlfriends in VR, the game has a “Sims” feel to it. Dilallo also directed a vividly-produced show dubbed Kim Kardashian Superstar that features Kardashian’s x-rated film. Also, if you are a fan of Kim Kardashian, there is VR porn movie about the celebrity by Vivid VR.
Another project in the offing is a VR “gentlemen’s club experience” dubbed the VR strip club in which Dilallo has partnered Christy Mack, a former porn actress and the San Fransisco Gold Club. It features filmed porn stars and dancers performing “immersive lap dances”.
VR Strip Club by Vixen VR
Picture yourself receiving VIP treatment in a strip club and enjoying virtual lap dances from the likes of Kendra Lust and Megan Rain. Initially, you could pre-order the project on VixenVR.com but later on it went on soft launch. You pay to enter the club then while inside, you can buy special privileges using more money. You can purchase credits for a solo lap dance that simulates all the happenings in a real strip club, at a much lower price. The app comes in various versions namely the R-rated version, a fully nude version and a topless version. Check a 360 video by Vixen VR:
Dilallo does not wish to confine the strip club app to the XXX title but wants it on mainstream platforms such as PlayStationVR. Dilallo believes in the future greater prospects in the merging of interactive gaming with filmed porn and considers animated porn to be a poor alternative as at now. He asserts that filmed porn provides the best realism, at least for now, due to its high quality.
Dilallo foresees the influx of game developers into porn having met them at meet ups such as the AVN porn awards in Las Vegas. He admits venturing into the adult space to augment his team and go mainstream since the costs of VR were prohibitive and they did not secure much support from venture capitalists. However, he acknowledged that after transiting to porn, it would be difficult to revert to the mainstream.
Dilallo considers his move to porn to be risky as he is largely a mainstream developer with future intentions of creating mainstream augmented reality and virtual reality films. He has in the past focused on mainstream games like Call of Duty, Guitar Hero, Spider-Man 3 and Spyro. Already he has faced rejection from conventions that were initially receptive but he takes it all in his stride and considers it part of the business that is highly competitive.
Similarly, Dilallo stated the up side of working in porn such as the chance to meets lots of interesting performers and personalities in the industry. For example, Fivestar, a porn director assisted him with a number of projects and aided him in producing VR video content at the Armory, a place that was initially thought not to exist. He has also had the opportunity to work with KinkVR and BadoinkVR and recounts his experience with them as being very professional.
So far, Dilallo admits to having an exciting experience in the fast paced adult space. He enjoys access to gentlemen’s clubs, gets to shoot in inside places such as The Armory and meets their owners. He confesses that the Armory is crazy. Besides, Dilallo is able to learn from other film makers on shooting. His experiences at the Armory have been very insightful and have inspired him with great ideas for the future. Although he is not certain of staying in the adult space completely, he intends to flirt with adult entertainment for a long period. And because he still owns the rights to the Julius Caesar story, Dilallo hopes to create the Julius Caesar game some day in the future.
