Page 50 - AVN January 2016

by MARKKERNES
> > Unlocking the Future of VR Porn > >
FEATURE
and a cellphone, you can be in a roomful of girls fucking. It’s called “virtual
Technology has advanced to the point where, with a set of special goggles
reality.”
We live in a three-dimensional world—height, width, depth—but our
media generally doesn’t. When we read a book, the words don’t hover above the
page. When we watch television, it’s not as if we’re looking at the action through
a window. Ditto for movies, although with the debut of James Cameron’s Avatar
in 2009, 3D film has undergone a revival, thanks to technical advances like digital
projection. In fact, the only “3D” mass medium is one that no one thinks about
any longer: music in stereo.
But in fact, 3D media have a long history. Although photography was invented
in the early 1800s, it didn’t take long for photographers to place two cameras
side-by-side to record images in 3D. Many famous scenes and portraits from
the 19th century are actually one half of a “stereo pair,” and in 1947, the David
White Company brought the Stereo Realist camera to market and sold more than
400,000 of them. Several other camera manufacturers like Kodak and Wollensak
quickly followed suit. Three short 3D movies were first exhibited at the Astor
Theater in New York City in 1915, and the genre became popular in the early
1950s with such hits as Creature From the Black Lagoon, House of Wax and Kiss Me
Kate.
Even adult got into the act, one of the earliest sexy 3D movies being The
Stewardesses (1969), and in the mid-’70s, about a dozen hardcore 3D movies in
anaglyph (red-blue) format were released. But porn abandoned the genre until it
was resurrected by Mark Franks’ Vidmax Productions in the late 1990s.
Vidmax produced about two dozen adult features, straight and gay, in what’s
called sequential-field 3D, which required electronic goggles to be seen on regular
TVs.
But with the renewed mainstream interest in 3D movies in the late ’90s came
the development of 3D TVs, in part because the technology had advanced far
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enough to make them, and Blu-ray players advanced enough to play the 3D movies
Hollywood was producing. But that same technology also produced another type
of 3D process: virtual reality—not to be confused with the two Virtual Reality
Stimulator 3D movies marketed by Juicy Entertainment in 2010, which were
anaglyph 3D.
The origins of virtual reality are difficult to trace, but of course, the idea of it
had appeared in science-fiction decades before the first VR viewer was invented.
In fact, VR was the focus of Stanley G. Weinbaum’s novel Pygmalion’s Spectacles,
which according to Britain’s Virtual Reality Society, featured “the idea of
a pair of goggles that let the wearer experience a fictional world through
holographics, smell, taste and touch.” The society’s article then goes on to credit
cinematographer Morton Hellig’s development in the mid-’50s of the Sensorama,
patented in 1962, which “featured stereo speakers, a stereoscopic 3D display,
fans, smell generators and a vibrating chair” so that users could fully experience
the six vignette films he created for the machine, including Belly Dancer, A Date
With Sabrina—Sabrina, famous for her 41-inch breasts, was a popular British sex
symbol at the time, and referenced in much ‘50s British comedy—and I’m a Coca-
Cola Bottle—revealing that, as often is the case, sex and technological advances are
intimately entwined.
The VR Society also reports on Hellig’s Telesphere Mask from 1960, the first
head-mounted display (HMD) which allowed the user to see 3D films with no
interactivity, but that was quickly eclipsed by two engineers from the Philco
Corporation (a popular mid-century TV brand) who, in 1961, developed the
Headsight, another HMD that had a tiny video screen for each eye which allowed
the user to see virtual reality via a pair of closed-circuit TV cameras. Finally,
in 1968, Prof. Ivan Sutherland and his student Bob Sproull invented the first
HMD that was connected to a computer, dubbing it the “Sword of Damocles”
because the thing was so heavy, it had to be suspended from the ceiling—and its
“computer generated graphics were very primitive wireframe rooms and objects.”