Pornographic content could be as instrumental in the VR wars as it was in the VHS age – or it could be a sideshow for weirdos
One of the oldest adages of technology is that where porn goes, success follows. It’s helped VHS beat out Betamax; it gave Blu-ray the final victory over HDDVD (although Sony then backed down before HD online streaming provided the nail in the coffin to both formats); and it helped spread faster internet connections, firstly providing a reason to upgrade to dial-up and then to broadband.
So could it be about to provide the same killing blow in the virtual reality wars, before they’ve even started?
US porn site Pornhub has launched its own VR porn channel. Partnering with specialist providers BaDoinkVR, the firm will begin providing 180˚ and 360˚ virtual video scenes on its site for free. While the porn will be viewable in a click-and-drag manner on the desktop, it will work best with purpose-built viewers, either cheap mobile phone accessories such as Google Cardboard or Samsung’s Gear VR or dedicated headsets such as the Oculus Rift.
Despite Pornhub’s bluster, the company isn’t debuting true VR content. That’s very hard to make, especially if it’s starring real actors, because it needs to incorporate the ability to, at minimum, track head position as well as rotation, and to offer stereoscopic 3D. It’s easy enough to do those things with computer-generated imagery, but “filming” actors to that standard requires expensive hardware that can generate detailed 3D models from the real world.
Even so, 360˚ video is one of the biggest sources of content for VR headsets available, with both YouTube and Facebook supporting the format on its own platforms. So the ability, or not, to access Pornhub’s porn could be a driving factor for adoption of VR. As analyst Thomas Husson, of Forrester Research, noted, “There will be for some time a chicken-and-egg issue: publishers and brands need reach to develop VR content and consumers want content to be ready (if they are going) to spend a premium on these new VR headsets.”
If the availability of online 360˚video, especially porn, comes to fill that hole, it could have a material impact on which of the three competing VR platforms sets the standard for future generations.
Sony’s Playstation VR, which is due in October, is seen by many as having the best chance of success. This is due to it undercutting rivals Oculus and HTC by £300 for the headset alone, and another £300 for the machine required to run it. But the Playstation VR works through Sony’s PS4 console, a locked-down platform in comparison to the PCs that its competitors rely on. Without Sony’s express permission, it’s impossible to run software on the PS4 and it seems unlikely that the company would grant Pornhub access to users’ homescreens (the PS4 does have a web browser but it’s poor quality).
Of course, all of this assumes that VR porn is something that you would want to experience. In fact, as Stuart Heritage found out, it’s closer to “deeply unpleasant” than “sensual and arousing”. Heritage concluded that “it all seems a bit niche, like it’s been designed by one lonely man with a very specific and vaguely unpleasant set of peccadilloes”.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010
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