Special For Women’s Day: How About Some Interactive, Authentic & Embodied Porn?
Sounds impossible I know, but it’s not. For this women’s day I’ve decided to be brave and share with you why I’m coding (and acting in) my own interactive VR porn apps and why you can get (some of) the content even if you don’t have VR. Ready?
You can also join a live Twitch stream this Sunday 11:00 PST. I will be going through some code and the ideas behind specific XtraSexyReality experiences. I sort of want to do it topless in my PJ’s like I usually code. Would love feedback on what you think of that idea?
Anyway, not many people know this, but my first interaction with VR was porn. After my first burning-man, a magical person I met in that crazy desert invited me to stay at his place for a few days. He had all the latest tech toys and let me play with them. One of the things he showed me was the first developer Oculus headsets and a vr porn movie to watch on it.
At this point in my life I was a big skeptic of this VR technology. As an embodied human who spent decades training in marital arts and dance I found it hard to believe that strapping a screen on my face would actually immerse me in a different reality and change my perception.
I updated that bias after 5 seconds of VR porn. There I was in some cheep hotel room but when I looked down I had a penis.
I was in that hotel room and the penis was “mine”. I remember the distinct “woah!” that came out of my mouth. Moments later a voluptuous woman walked towards me and started licking my penis, she didn’t ask me and I had no agency in this experience. I was just a passive viewer.
The combination of high immersiveness with total lack of control was too much for me and I took off the headset. Since then I’ve been dreaming of making something different, something that uses this immersiveness but gives people agency and ability to interact with the environment, something that focuses on consent and tries to actually connect to whoever is inhabiting the headset.
It took me 5 year, some of which I’ve spent in academia opening a VR lab at Donders institute in the Netherlands, researching the effect of this technology on the link between our brain and body. Utilizing a neuroscience framework called predictive processing I gained a deeper understanding of how our sense of bodily self is formed when the brain statistically correlates information coming from different senses. The fast refresh rate of VR that is correlated to our head movements and proprioception (the sensation of where your body is in space) is what makes VR different than other technologies and the reason I’ve become pretty much obsessed with the possibilities this offers.
Once in a while I’d check in to see what was going on in the VR porn world. The mainstream seems to be male gaze based passive videos and Japanese anime style interactive games many of which involve a submissive character or even rape like games.
The only person I came across doing something different was Ella Darling (the co-founder of VRTube.xxx), and she was cool enough to give me a bunch of advice when I decided I’m actually going to make my own experiences. Since then I’ve also chatted with Cathline Smoo the VR Sexologist (ww.thevrsexologist.com) who is creating some very interesting stuff. (Please send more cool things my way!)
Porn has driven many industries, form video to internet to streaming, why should VR be any different? In this new industry that has the power to shape our perception more then any technology we’ve seen before I want to create an alternative that reflects my sexuality.
I was lucky enough to have a long distance partner that was excited to join me on this adventure. Tamar, is a brilliant, funny and incredibly hot women. She has a masters in psychology (let’s send her some encouragement to finish her PHD one day). She is also a very talented and hard working sex worker in the Netherlands, which thankfully has much more progressive laws about sex work. On one of her visits we wrote a branching story-line script similar to Bandersnatch and filmed it (We filmed before Bandersnatch came out). It was one of the most fun and funny days I’ve had. A friend in a lovely community house with a beautiful view and a hot tub provided the location and a friend with all the latest cameras set up the gear for us and stepped off the “set”. We then proceeded to act out a bunch of our wildest fantasies. We also made sure to capture all of our scene negotiations so we can give an example of how to stay safe and in tune with each others needs even when things turn pretty wild. Consent can be sexy too!
I don’t want to give away too much but some of the scenes involved upsidedown tree sex, fisting on a giant teddy bear and dog play.
Next came the hard parts, editing and coding. Dealing with giant video files from multiple cameras was a challenge. I’m pretty sure we are the first porn app that lets people teleport between two different cameras in some of the scenes. Another challenge was to gamify basic head gaze interactions. We came up with the horny meter, a rainbow dildo that grows or shrinks with the players head movements and let’s them communicate how horny they are.
We started showing the app at various play parties both in San-Franciso and the Netherlands. We were user testing and fixing bugs for a while. Branching narratives are hard.
When we were ready to put this out there we decided to go with Steam. The online computer gaming platform had recently announced that it had opened an adult content sections. We jumped through many bureaucratic hoops, paid them fees and learnt how to work with their outdated tools and terrible documentation. Our store was approved and then right before the launch we got banned. The content was too adult. Shooting and killing people as a game is fine, raping underage looking anime girls is as a game is fine but interacting and playing with 2 adult consenting females was too pornographic. This was a hard hit for us. When we applied for the store we filled an adult content survey and communicated that our game contained explicit sexual materials. Why would we get approved just to be banned the moment someone actually played the game is a mystery we might never get an answer too.
We were dismayed because what we made wasn’t a video, it was an interactive app so it didn’t plug and play into any of the existing vr porn sites. For a while this project took the back burner while we started to research what it would take to make our own web site. Dedicated servers that don’t shut down adult content, payment merchants that don’t steal your money if you violate their conservative code of conduct banning sexual content and FBI compliance with paperwork proving we were not minors where some of the daunting tasks to complete if we ever wanted to get this out there. I was getting advice from Peter Acworth, the previous CEO of kink.com and Ella Darling who I’ve mentioned previously. To be honest I wasn’t sure I had it in me to actually see this through. Then I went to Techcrunch Disrupt and was amazed and delighted to see a panel about sex and technology. Cyan Banister an entrepreneur and venture capitalist and Cindy Gallop, the founder of make love not porn were both inspiring women I deeply look up to. Hearing them talk about the obstacles they faced and about how important it was for woman to build the world we want to live in was the kick in the butt I needed.
I grew up in an Israeli orthodox Jewish environment where my womb was my biggest possible contribution, where my elbows and knees where sexualized and covered while pervert teachers standing at the entrance of schools would measure our skirt’s length. Sex “education” is mandatory by the government, sending couples before they marry to a religious women who tries to convince them to follow traditional religious rules like not touching a woman for 2 weeks in a menstrual cycle. In traditional Jewish law the women is contaminated and unholy and should not have sex or even be touched while on her period and the week after, until she is examined by a religious woman and dips into some rain water while praying. Somehow this is a beautiful tradition for some, but for me this is oppressive, shaming and controlling. I was brave enough and lucky enough to leave that world behind me. But even in the secular world except for the lovely bubbles I surround myself in, things aren’t much better. Women face a two sided sword when it comes to sex. Objectified by media, pressured, raped and forced to comply on one side while they are slut-shamed, oppressed and shamed for enjoying sex on the other.
I want to live in a world were sex is a healthy activity that connects people. A world where people feel safe to express their wants and able to communicate their no without being shamed or pressured to comply. I want to live in a world were people explore their boundaries together and have utter respect and care for each other even when mistakes are made. I want to live in a world where people’s natural hunger for sex and play can be fed in creative consensual ways. I want to live in a world were sex work is destigmatized and sex workers are respected for their contribution to society so I’m going to do my best to build this world.
Listening to these inspiring women at Techcrunch also ticked some box in my head to think bigger and I realized that with a bit more work the VR experience would work on any (windows) gaming computer and that I could even share some of the unique 360 or stereoscopic videos as well as my code. The 2D versions wouldn’t be as immersive but would still offer, novelty, fun and some interactivity as the content itself is created as dialog with the player specifically to try to create a connection. Besides, as a VR evangelist I think its up to us developers to build experience that are cross platform and show people how cool VR can be even if they don’t have VR. VR Chat, my favorite social platform does that with a desktop version. VR isn’t growing as fast because people aren’t realizing what they are missing out on and I wanted to give them a taste.
So we jumped though months of negotiations to be able to receive credit cards. Our store is pci compliant with the strongest security and we do not store any credit card detail. That’s part of the higher barrier for adult content providers to get approved as a credit merchants.
Now our creation, born out of love, curiosity and a hell of a lot of work is out there and I would appreciate your help. We don’t have a marketing budget and even if we did marketing adult content is extremely difficult so to be able to get to players we are relying on people that want to create the same world we do. Please share this article or our actual website (www.xtrasexyreality.com) in your networks. We are giving out free promo codes for sex workers and sex educators so feel free to contact us through the site and we will send you a code. Also if you are interested in getting involved in this project we are actively looking for collaborators there aren’t many of us sex positivist out there so feel free to reach out.