Page 14 - AVN January 2016

WE’VE GOT ISSUES | | By Sharan Street
Shadow Play
The evolution of a new reality
JUNE 2016
In this month’s cover story, Mark Kernes looks
back to the 19th century for the historical threads
that led to the development of so-called virtual
reality. But in truth the roots of creating alternative
realities were planted with the emergence of
prehistoric art forms.
Some 40,000 years ago, humans began replicating
the real world using the materials at hand. Early
artists filled the walls of caves around the world,
from Lascaux and Altamira to other ancient sites in
Indonesia, Africa and India. Rather than putting on
goggles and firing up microprocessors, their peers
would enter the enclosed space to be transported to a
reality separate from the outside world.
That space within a cavern is more than a physical
manifestation of virtual reality. Consider Plato’s
allegory of the cave, which cuts to the chase of the
human quest to understand consciousness.
His Republic, written around 380 BC, presents a
dialogue between Plato’s brother Glaucon and his
mentor Socrates about a group of people chained up
their entire lives in a cave, facing a wall upon which
are projected the shadows of things passing in front of
a fire. These shadows become a shared reality. In this
allegory, the philosopher is a prisoner freed from the
cave who perceives true reality outside the cave.
So where does that leave modern humans, on
the doorstep of new technology that can turn the
cave of shadows into a globally shared virtual reality
unconnected to the physical world? It’s a potent
question with answers that continue to evolve.
In April of last year, AVN did a cover story on
virtual reality in adult entertainment. In just over
a year, the landscape has shifted completely, with
many more companies entering the VR space. In the
aforementioned story, AVN’s Mark Kernes covers
some of the players in adult VR—among them
HoloFilm Productions, KinkVR, Holodexxx, VR
Bangers, CAM4, Grooby, BaDoink, Naughty America,
Lightsouthern, CamSoda and VR Sexperience—about
the mechanics of producing VR entertainment.
Stewart Tongue talks to reps from some of these
companies and others, such as Pimproll and YanksVR,
about what VR needs to go from “next” to now. Dan
Miller delves into the future of AliceX, which is
joining the live-cam VR market, and RubyVR, making
its mark with branded headsets. And Sherri L. Shaulis
gives a short history of interactive sex toys, from
the RealTouch to Kiiroo’s Onyx and Pearl models,
designed for long-distance liaisons.
Readers who find this package compelling would
serve themselves well by reading the May 2016 cover
story on VR in Wired magazine, which offers a look
about what’s going on in mainstream VR. The writer,
Kevin Kelly, begins the piece with a description of
the work being done by Magic Leap, a Florida tech
company that is pioneering “mixed reality”—a form
of VR where human-created images are commingled
with the physical environment. As Kelly notes, the
technology represents “one of the great promises of
artificial reality—either you get teleported to magical
places or magical things get teleported to you.”
And that, right there, turns the tables on the
allegory of the cave. Where does the shadow end and
the true reality begin?
Kelly details the problems to be surmounted before
VR fully blossoms into the disruptive technology it
is sure to become. And these are the same problems
that adult VR experts must overcome. For one, there’s
“the dork factor”: in other words, how silly one feels
walking around with a giant headset. Closely related
is the problems of “tethers”—the power cords or
batteries needed to power the devices—which leave
the user feeling chained, as in Plato’s cave. But
perhaps paramount is the inadequate interface: As
Kelly notes, the “VR industry is waiting for its Doug
Engelbart to invent the equivalent of the mouse.”
But more important than technical matters, Kelly
brings up the question of how VR will be used in the
not-too-distant future.
Describing a big takeaway from the virtual worlds
he entered, Kelly writes, “although every one of these
environments was fake, the experiences I had in them
were genuine.” Unlike other media, he explains,
“People remember VR experiences not as a memory of
something they saw but as something that happened
to them.”
This new paradigm will completely retool the
internet, Kelly argues. “This shift from the creation,
transmission and consumption of information to
the creation, transmission, and consumption of
experience defines the new platform.”
And the mind-boggling thing is, the internet
itself—at least in its hyperlinked present form—is still
only a quarter-century old. And, as Kelly writes, “We
haven’t fully absorbed the enormous benefit that the
internet of information has brought to the world. And
yet we are about to recapitulate this accomplishment
with the advent of synthetic realities.”
What will come in the wake of this tectonic shift?
There will be huge questions of safety, ethnics, civic
engagement, intellectual property rights, privacy
and Big Data (for more on some of that, see Kernes’
sidebar on Oculus Rift). But on the positive side,
there are the creative possibilities that will come. As
Kelly points out, “VR is as much a creation tool as
it is a consumption tool. As much fun as it was to
explore VR, it was more fun to make it. For a long
time, nobody believed amateurs would make their
own videos, but that changed when you could easily
film a scene by holding up a phone.”
So looking to the future, those who win in this new
space may be those who give the end user the best
tools with which they can create their own reality.
Rather than content or traffic, perhaps it’s creativity
that will be king.
14 | AVN.com | 6.16