Page 51 - AVN January 2016

by STEWARTTONGUE
As the 21st century was approaching, two electronic gaming companies,
Sega and Nintendo, had tried to incorporate VR into their systems, but both
were market failures, though general public interest in VR began to grow. Wired
magazine reports that in 1989, tech geek Kevin Kelly was introduced to a primitive
form of virtual reality by inventor Jaron Lanier, where the pair donned goggles that
ONthe Edge What virtual reality needs to go from ‘next’ to now
allowed them to appear as avatars in a virtual world, and even allowed them to
manipulate virtual objects using a pair of electronic gloves. In 1990, Kelly, along
with Whole Earth Catalog creator Stewart Brand and Grateful Dead manager Jon
Mcintyre, “organized the first public hands-on exhibit (called Cyberthon), which
premiered two dozen experimental VR systems from the US military, universities,
and Silicon Valley.”
Now, of course, VR is all over the place, and all the tech publications—and
plenty of mainstream ones—are writing about it, and well they should, since VR
technology seems to be changing on almost a daily basis. They usually start with
Oculus, whose 2012 Kickstarter for its Oculus Rift goggles, which finally found
their way into consumers’ hands in March of 2016, made worldwide news, though
a few other VR headsets preceded it to market. Those include HTC’s Vive, which
plugs into a computer to deliver content; Samsung’s Gear VR, which utilizes
content downloaded to a Samsung smartphone ... and Google Cardboard which,
sure enough, is made of cardboard with plastic lenses—and therefore incredibly
cheap. It too uses a smartphone to deliver the image, but it doesn’t care which
phone is used.
(And lest anyone scoff at using a cheap viewer like Google Cardboard, consider
the case to Teegan Lexcen, a baby born with just one lung and half a heart.
Pediatric surgeons used video of a model of Teegan’s existing heart to create VR
3D, and using Google Cardboard, a surgeon in Miami operated successfully on the
infant, whose heart was wrongly positioned in her body, to make her one ventricle
do the work of two.)
“The Vive was the hit at CES; a four-hour long line to try this thing,” noted Ian
Paul of Naughty America, one of the early producers of VR porn, which displayed
its product to media in its hotel suite during the 2016 Consumer Electronics
Show.
“The cool thing about that one, it has a camera on the outside so you can
actually walk around your room, and if you get close to a wall, it will superimpose
the wall as a grid into your field of view, kind of like the holodeck on Star Trek,
when you touch it, so it enables you to have more interactive real-world virtual
experiences.
“As for the Samsung Gear, when you put your Samsung device into the viewer,
you enter the Samsung world; it automatically boots up an app on your phone; you
can’t control that, so you’re into a Samsung world, and once you’re in the world,
you can look around at different applications that you can load,” he added, noting,
“They don’t allow any adult applications into this world, so what you end up
having to do is create a directory on your phone, side-load the content onto your
phone—either go into your browser, log into our website, download it ‘save as’
or download to your PC, and then transfer it over with a USB cable. It’s kind of
annoying.”
Paul expressed his dismay that so far, Apple has been completely behind the
times in getting behind VR, and that Sony, which is getting into it, is equally
against adult content.
“I would like to see Sony and other companies acknowledge, just like cable
companies have acknowledged, that there is desire for adult content and they
should partner with some safe, trusted brands that have very defined brand
guidelines,” he offered. “We’re not talking about a tube site where everything is
a free-for-all, but a company like Naughty America, which has very defined brand
guidelines about how women are treated and what is acceptable in the videos. I
think a partnership like that would be great, and especially since we’re a recurring
subscription model, we can easily cut them in on the revenue on a month-to-
month basis. We can have affiliate programs and everything. Adult is the master of
the affiliate program.”
Naughty America’s VR is 180 degrees—in other words, half a
sphere—and there’s been some controversy over whether 180 degrees,
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220 or even 270 is “true VR,” given that some producers like HoloFilm
Productions have shot scenes in full 360 degrees. The advantages on
Small Hands and Rachel Rampage in a shoot for HoloGirlsVR.com.
For quite a long time people talked about mobile being the next big thing in the
world of online marketing. Some companies bought in too early, others missed the
rise of mobile completely to their detriment, but everyone can agree the mobile
era is now dominating digital commerce. As mobile continues to mature, industry
pioneers are hard at work trying to figure out what comes next, and virtual reality is
clearly among the leading candidates. AVN asked the brands at the forefront of the
VR movement to give us their views on how close the technology is to being widely
adopted, and to identify some of the milestones needed to allow virtual reality to
go from being “next” to become a dominant force in digital revenue right now.
Todd Spaits, CMO of YanksVR, has been an early adopter of new technologies
in the adult space throughout his time at Yanks.com, and while he was admittedly
too early into mobile during the pre-smartphone era, he is applying those lessons
to the company’s VR offerings with great success. “To be successful, content
producers and affiliates should be laying the groundwork to become flexible and
highly responsive to the market as it unfolds,” Spaits explained. “I expect VR to
explode by Christmas of 2016, led by gaming and a flood of cardboard-holding
pre-qualified customers. If I were an affiliate I would promote both the VR and flat
version of any brand that converts. Then balance accordingly.”
One of the centerpieces of the new PimpRoll performance network is its
flagship virtual reality site WankzVR.com. “What we have here is a technology that
can vastly improve upon our experiences with media, similar to how the
internet made information so attainable,” explained Phil Bradbury, vice
president of PimpRoll. “While diving into VR is certainly a long play, the
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