Yhivi stands in front of you, biting her lip. She seems self-conscious, her hands on your knees. “The movie was pretty good, but I’m more interested in you,” she says, and grins at the corniness of her own line. Her eyebrows raise and scrunch, and she moves closer. She takes a short, sharp breath, and closes her eyes. All you can see for less than a second is powdery gold eye shadow and long, black lashes, as she closes her eyes and kisses you. She leans back, grinning widely, in stereoscopic 3D. Yhivi’s just had her first kiss with a set of high-definition virtual reality cameras.
“When I watched it in a headset later, I could actually feel the tingle on my face,” director and producer Anna Lee said. This was one of her earliest virtual reality projects, released in 2016, and one of the first VR porn films in the entire industry to attempt a virtual reality kiss. Most VR porn at the time featured a model riding a disembodied penis, down-range from a set of taut abs and half-down pants.
“It felt real. It blew me away. And that’s when I knew the potential of what we were about to do.”
Virtual reality porn has been sitting on the cusp of the “future of sex” for the last decade. At the pace of advancement today, that’s like waiting centuries for the next technology to catch on. With tube sites devouring pornographers’ revenue and crashing the industry in the early 2000s, consumer-level VR headsets seemed like a miracle on the horizon, something to reinvigorate the industry and get viewers paying for porn again.
Inventors, researchers, and the military have been tinkering with prototypes of VR headsets for decades. Depending on your definition of virtual reality, this really began in the 1950s, with cinematographer Morton Heilig’s Sensorama movie booths, though there was nothing available to purchase and bring home until the mid-2000s, when phone-powered headsets like Samsung Gear and Google Cardboard arrived. Rumors of a new, groundbreaking VR headset, called the Oculus Rift, started to swirl in 2012. The Rift would run using your PC instead of a cell phone and would offer a more powerful, realistic experience complete with handheld controllers to navigate the virtual landscape. Facebook bought Oculus in 2014, throwing fuel on a blazing VR hype cycle. By the time Rift launched in 2016, pornographers trying to stay a step ahead of the competition were ready with content compatible with the headset. People had waited a long time to buy an Oculus headset—porn would naturally be there to fill in what feature films and games lacked.
In 2021, Mark Zuckerberg announced that, along with rebranding Facebook into “Meta,” his company would start aiming in earnest for a user base in the metaverse. Echoing old ideas about virtual reality from Snow Crash, Ready Player One, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (all set in dystopian societies, it should be noted), he laid out a vision for people working, living, and playing in VR as a matter of routine. Facebook and Instagram have been historically hostile toward anything even tangentially sexual; it’s safe to assume that sexual expression for adults won’t be welcome in Meta’s metaverse.
But many of the longest-lasting, and most successful, virtual worlds involved or at least permitted sex. More than a year before the launch of Oculus, Red Light District, a virtual world that’s like Second Life for X-rated play, announced its newest game version would be compatible with Oculus headsets.
To forbid intimacy in social VR would be to miss the whole point and ignore thirty years of lessons from virtual societies. “The whole beauty of the metaverse is the chance to step outside of our human bodies and real world identities we choose or, depending on circumstances, are forced to live in,” Angelina Aleksandrovich, founder of sex-positive virtual reality community RD Land, said soon after Zuckerberg’s announcement. “We no longer have to comply with the biological nature or a lack of resources to self-express our inner being as we wish.”
A VR porn set looks and operates a lot like a two-dimensional set— you still have performers milling around waiting for their scene, directors blocking out their positions, hair, makeup, and going over consent forms—but once the cameras start rolling, everything changes.
If they’re shooting scenes from a straight male point of view (most VR porn is this genre, and according to Lee, it’s what most fans ask for), the man is reclining or lying down with two cameras in front of his face. Aside from an occasional scripted moment, he must remain still, erect, and with his hands out of the frame and off the woman on top of him.
“It requires somebody who can handle it physically, because it’s physically demanding, and also has the ability to speak flawlessly to the camera, while conveying a sense of authenticity,” Lee said. “The big thing that differs between VR and regular porn is intimacy.” The performer is tasked with delivering an authentic, emotionally evocative performance while whispering dirty talk to a pair of lenses. Performances where the camera is the main character bad VR porn apart from the good.
Although it’s still a long way from market saturation, Lee believes not only in widespread VR adoption but also in the power of a medium still untapped by many other pornographers. The hardware can be cutting-edge, the frame rate blistering-fast, but the human connection behind it is where people really get hooked.
“I just want to turn people on in general,” Lee said. “You do not need a penis in the foreground to do that. What you need is an experience that makes you feel connected, makes you feel desired—because everybody wants to feel like the person that they’re looking at wants them. That’s a universal thing that crosses all genders.”
How Sex Changed the Internet and the Internet Changed Sex by Samantha Cole (Workman) is available from Amazon and Bookshop.