The era of immersive, 360-degree simulated sex on your smartphone has finally arrived. One would have figured that the recent release of the Oculus Rift, Samsung’s Gear VR and Google’s virtual reality headset Cardboard would eventually result in VR porn, and this hand-y technology is now available to anyone with a smartphone and a cheap VR headset. To celebrate the advent of this era, more than a hunded VR porn innovators, adult industry personalities, and habitual masturbators came together at the Kink.com Upper Floor Thursday night for a powwow called Traffic Jam 2016 that showcased the most state-of-the-art technology available for these strap-on devices.
NOTE: While this article is Safe For Work, all of the links below are VERY NSFW! Clicking on any of the links below will display outrageously explicit images, massively erect schlongs and fully nude starlets. Furthermore, many of these sites are designed to be viewed with a VR headset — so the erotic images will display in bizarrely formatted double vision if viewed on your workplace desktop. The sites are best viewed through a VR headset, preferably in an uninterrupted solo environment.
So how, exactly, do they make 360-degree virtual reality porn?
Take a look at this apparatus, a combination of GoPro cameras and synthetic human ears. “This is our 360-degree VR rig that we use to shoot events,” said George, a camera operator at Kink.com. “Every piece is commercially available. They’re all just things I had to Frankenstein together to make it work.”
“The microphones have human ears on them because you hear things the way you do because of the shape of your ears,” he told SFist. “If it’s just a hole inside of your head, you hear things differently.”
Kink uses this and other VR cameras for their [Again! Very NSFW!] KinkVR.com site that’s one of the few sources of any gay VR porn. “With Kink.com, we produce a lot of niche websites,” Kink spokesman Mike Stabile said. “We produce gay content, which there is not a lot of in VR. A lot of the [competitors’] content is very middle-of-the-road. You see a lot of hotel room blowjobs.”
Kink's custom, branded Google Cardboard VR viewers. Image: Joe Kukura, SFist
Kink co-hosted the event with the adult streaming site Gamelink, who recently put out a virtual reality porn aggregate site as a clearinghouse of the best VR porn. “We’re like the Netflix of VR. We take the best movies and we put them on our platform,” said Jeff Dillon, VP of business development at Gamelink. “It’s a big shift in how the adult industry is producing and distributing content.”
Even live cam sessions with adult performers are now available on your smartphone. I caught up with the VR cam girl Ela Darling of Cam4VR, the first ever live cam platform in virtual reality. “It’s a photorealistic 3D, 360-degree experience,” Ms. Darling told SFist. “You get a real sense of who I am. You see the skulls on my shelf. You see the water-color portrait of Boba Fett. Everything that makes me me. It accelerates the intimacy and it also lends a greater sense of personhood to the performer.”
RubyVR headsets. Image: Joe Kukura, SFist
But most of us are not yet jacking it to VR porn, though, because most of us do not yet have these VR headsets. That’s where RubyVR comes in, and the totally Safe For Work RubyVR website sells affordable, custom, or branded smartphone-compatible Google Cardboard VR headsets for as little as $2. That’s the cheap model, of course, and they have higher-end headsets equipped with a headstrap available in the $35 range.
“You need the headstrap for this industry,” RubyVR EVP Michael Donohue told SFist. “You know the term ‘hands-free’? We like to say our headsets are ‘hand-free’.”
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