Today’s headline at The Virge focuses on the way that Oculus, the Facebook-owned leading manufacturer of virtual reality (VR) headsets, is forcing its users into the Facebook social media ecosystem, and appears perfectly willing to soft-brick its own hardware to punish the reluctant or unwilling:

You’ll Need a Facebook Account to Use Future Oculus Headsets.

Oculus will soon require all of its virtual reality headset users to sign up with a Facebook account.

…

Starting later this year, you’ll only be able to sign up for an Oculus account through Facebook. If you already have an account, you’ll be prompted to permanently merge your account. If you don’t, you’ll be able to use the headset normally until 2023, at which point official support will end. Old headsets using non-linked accounts will still work, but some games and apps may no longer function.

…

Facebook also says that all future unreleased Oculus devices will require a Facebook login, even if you’ve got a separate account already.

Yes, that’s a clear violation of our nation’s anti-trust laws. No, anti-trust enforcement isn’t really a thing these days, which is how they can get away with it. Moving on. Antitrust in tech is a fascinating subject, but it’s not the ErosBlog beat.

Pornocalypse? Now, that’s our beat. From the article:

The new changes apparently consolidate Facebook’s management of its platforms. A new privacy policy will be administered by Facebook itself, not the separate Facebook Technologies hardware subsidiary, and “Facebook will manage all decisions around use, processing, retention and sharing of your data.” Oculus will also adopt Facebook’s core community standards rather than use a separate code of conduct, and Facebook will add a new “VR-focused” section to its standards.

Emphasis added by me: “Oculus will also adopt Facebook’s core community standards.” Boom. Headshot. That’s the ballgame. #Pornocalypse comes for Oculus. It’s right there in the Facebook community standards:

The very first time I ever mentioned virtual reality porn on this blog was in 2016, when I quoted Mark Mann at The Walrus for the proposition that VR porn was a compelling use of virtual reality:

When it comes to porn, VR is so engaging that viewers “forget” it’s a simulation. The penis I saw through my headset, for example, seemed to rise from between my legs. It wasn’t an unnaturally large member, and the owner was caucasian, so it was believably my own. The model was life-size and more than life-like. It was so much like being alone in a room with another living, breathing human that my mind didn’t bother to contemplate the difference.

In a nutshell, that’s why porn has been a big driver of headset sales from the beginning. Porn is always a driver of new and expensive technologies, especially if you’re marketing the fancy new gadgets (and you always are) to well-off young tech-savvy men. And that’s why it’s always been a truism in tech that, if your system doesn’t have porn on it, your system is broken. In my 2013 The Pornocalypse Comes For Us All post, I quoted some 2008 words by Ethan Zuckerman that he attributed to his late-1990s experiences at Tripod, an early web hosting and prototypical social media company in what was called the “portal” space:

I’d offer the hypothesis that any sufficiently advanced read/write technology will get used for two purposes: pornography and activism. Porn is a weak test for the success of participatory media — it’s like tapping a mike and asking, “Is it on?” If you’re not getting porn in your system, it doesn’t work.

Porn has really worked well for Oculus/Facebook. The headset company had its origins in a successful 2012 Kickstarter, got bought by Facebook in 2014, and released its first consumer product in 2016. Thus, Facebook has been in complete control, throughout the product’s rise to prominence in the world of VR porn.

You might reasonably ask “What prominence?” So, let’s do a little experiment to assess that. Type “VR Porn” into your browser. As I write this, the first result is, no shock, a site called VRPorn.com. (They have, more than once, been ErosBlog advertisers.) One click (on “How to watch VR Porn”) takes you to their hardware page. Oculus products make up three of their ten supported platforms:

It’s the same old weary pornocalypse story. Tech companies (even ones like Facebook, which has #pornocalypse backed into its very bones) cheerfully allow porn during the initial stages of a new technology or social media project. Then, once the product reaches a certain stage of maturity, they decide it’s time to “go respectable” and push all the porn off the platform. Dance with the ones what brung ya? Hell no! We don’t even know those dirty perverts!

#Pornocalypse comes for us all. Today (with delayed/deferred rolling implementation stretching to 2023) it came for all the people who dropped large coin for an Oculus headset in the expectation of watching porn on it. Facebook says to you: “Sorry, suckers!”

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After numerous posts in 2016 and 2017, developments on the virtual reality porn front have been slow here at ErosBlog in 2018. I still don’t have a quality high-tech VR headset, although I have finally had the chance to tinker with a few of the worst of the cheap ones that you basically just wrap around your phone. These are now starting to show up at local garage sales for next to nothing. But a real headset, like a Rift or a Vive? I keep thinking someone will send me one to review, but it hasn’t happened yet. Oh well. The day will come!

Meanwhile I remain interested in developments in VR porn, and in the sites that aggregate it for surfers and consumers. So I always welcome the opportunity to look in depth at another VR porn resource site like the one at Ultimate VR Porn. This is a slick-looking portal that combines trailers and teaser clips from all of the currently top-rated virtual reality porn movies, a ranked list of the best VR porn sites complete with the reviews that support that assertion that they are the best, and a detailed series of tech guides explaining how to set up all the leading VR porn devices. (Given that these are somewhat complicated devices, guides explaining how to get them plugged in and loaded with porn seem likely to be useful, especially given the way the #pornocalypse tends to keep porn hard to reach from official content and app stores.)

Any fool can throw together a list of VR porn sites, but I am always more interested in a good ranking that’s justified with reviews and user ratings. This catalog of the best vr porn sites appears to be at least somewhat data-driven:

One more new-to-me thing I noticed at the Ultimate VR Porn site is that the display of VR porn clips and trailers and teasers to people (like me) who are checking things out without a VR headset has been enormously standardized and improved, at least in an up-to-date Chrome browser. In 2016 when I first started looking at VR clips in a standard browser, they would often (but, confusingly, not always) appear as two side-by-side clips like some sort of 1890s stereogram you would hold up to a candle on a wooden stick. Talk about retro!

It’s different — by which I mean better — these days, though. Today they present themselves to our vision on the screen looking at first like a standard video clip, such as you would encounter at any tubesite or clipstore, only with the slight fuzziness that hints of three-dimensionality on a 3D television. But you-the-viewer can interact with the clip using your mouse; you can grab and pan the scene left, right, up, and down (somewhat similar to how you would look with head movements while wearing a headset) and zoom in or out using the scroll wheel. It’s not having a headset, but it does give you a fair way to interrogate the VR porn clip or trailer to see how it was shot and what you would get if you indeed were to buy the whole scene and were viewing it with a proper headset. This is an enormous improvement over the way sample clips worked just a year or two ago!

For several months now the noise around virtual-reality porn has been growing louder and louder in my inbox and on the porn-business social media feeds I see. Although market penetration on VR headsets is still short of what the porn companies selling these products would like it to be, headsets are on a lot of Christmas lists and everybody I’ve talked to thinks that if 2016 wasn’t quite the breakout year for VR as a ubiquitous consumer technology, 2017 almost certainly will be.

Meanwhile we are seeing development of robustly useful aggregation sites like the one at VR Porn, where they tell me their goal is to bring all the adult VR content from all the different VR porn studios together in one convenient place. They offer free short trailers and clips and the usual links for purchasing the full product. The trailers and sample stills are decently high-resolution and give you a good idea what you are getting, as in the case of this WankzVR video starring Marica Hase:

What really sets VRPorn.com apart is that they have also compiled an enormous catalog of free sex-themed VR downloads, including CGI animations, anime-type short movies, and free porn-game apps that run on the various VR platforms. It’s the first place I’ve seen that offers a well-curated and useful collection of adult VR free content to complement their paid VR porn offerings, and although the free stuff varies in quality as you would expect and is frequently short and/or fairly simple, some of it is visually very fine indeed, like this elf-girl riding the viewer cowgirl-style:

Remember up at the top of the post when I mentioned that VR headsets are on a lot of Christmas lists? I learned some more about that when I began to peruse the VRPorn.com blog, which focuses not just on the porn but includes updates about the burgeoning VR industry as a whole. According to the post Weekday VR Update: November 14, 2016, this is to be the first year when headsets will be discounted on Black Friday:

This is the first Black Friday where VR head mounted displays, such as the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, will see some Black Friday love. The first of which is Best Buy, who plans to offer a $100 store credit when a consumer purchases an Oculus Rift head mounted display. Second, Microsoft will also be offering a $100 store gift card with the purchase of either an Oculus Rift or the HTC Vive through their Microsoft Store.

The blog at VRPorn.com may actually be one of the site’s more amazing assets. It’s not an afterthought or a parade of press releases; it’s a content-rich stream that includes things like this incredibly-detailed review of a third-party VR game being developed via Patreon that’s called VR Titties. The review is like 25 paragraphs long with dozens of screenshots, a level of detail that is perhaps necessary given the number of customization sliders in the game:

But my point here is that these guys are VR porn enthusiasts. Yes, they want to sell you some porn for your VR headset, but they are also obviously and genuinely interested in all the sexy things you can do with it. It’s the first site I’ve seen with such a useful mix of resources, and should be a regular stop for any VR afficionado who reads ErosBlog.

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