It has been awhile since we looked at the state of the art in VR headsets and how well they will work for porn. We are still waiting for something groundbreaking. As Greg Sullivan, director of communications for Microsoft’s Mixed Reality arm, said in an interview with UploadVR: “Interestingly, the immersive VR headsets were pitched as consumer devices and I think did not meet, in general, the high expectations that were set for them there. But what you’re seeing now is more and more commercial applications for those types of experiences.”

Even so, new models have come out. I have said in the past that true VR without any screendoor effect and with high realism requires at least 60 frames per second and 4K in each eye. That is the goal. We are not there quite yet. Pimax had a Kickstarter promising an 8K headset in 2017. They are shipping it now, but surprisingly, their 5K version is sharper, due to the arrangement of pixels and the fact that they do not offer actual 8K. Even worse, it won’t actually accept native-resolution 8K video input. Despite the promises, this is not the 8K headset we are looking for. Still, it seems to be the best on the market, although you may have trouble getting one from the Chinese company as their shipping seems to be a little spotty.

The real problem is that 8K televisions are just now appearing on the market at a price below $10,000. Two years ago Sharp introduced the first 8K TV for $133,000, and those early adopters are still waiting for 8K content, while there is still surprisingly little general 4K content (although quite a bit of porn). It may be a very long time before we see 8K content for televisions. There are 8K cameras but nothing even close to even the prosumer price range. You are generally looking at five figures. You also need to store all this video. A 2 terabyte drive will hold just four hours of 8k content.

The only company I know streaming 8K content is Vimeo. I don’t know of any porn companies shooting in 8K, and why would they? There is not even a streaming 8K standard for televisions yet. There is some good news on the computer side. VESA has released the new DiplayPort 2.0 standard, which triples bandwidth and supports output of dual 4K displays at 120Hz. That is just what you need for VR. Products that support this new standard will not be on the market until the end of 2020 though.

So, even if an actual 8K headset appears, we also need lower cost cameras, faster streaming, and much greater general adoption of 8K in general to bring the costs down. 8K headsets are the goal, but no matter how you look at it, they are realistically still a long ways off.

Setting 8K aside, where are the mainstream headset manufacturers now? The Oculus Quest was recently released and many reviewers are proclaiming it the best VR headset yet. It is wireless and self-contained. No one wants to be tethered by wires. You get 1440 x 1600 per eye with a refresh rate of 72Hz. It incorporates floveated rendering, a feature I expect to become common as it reduces stress on the processor. It really needs to be paired with eye tracking to make it full effective, otherwise, as in this case, it just blurs the edges of the display. It has six degrees of tracking as opposed to the typical three. This gives you a lot more freedom of movement. It is strictly VR, with no AR (Augmented Reality) capabilities.

Another next generation headset is expected this Spring with HTC’s Vive Cosmos. It has slightly higher resolution than the Quest at 1440×1700 per eye, which is an 88% improvement over the earlier Vive model. Neither the Quest or the Cosmos resolution is enough to completely eliminate the screendoor effect, but it is an improvement. It also uses inside-out tracking. It does not have floveated rendering or eye tracking, which is fine as one with out the other does not make a lot of sense to me. It is apparently a tethered headset, but maybe not. They have intimated that it will work with more than just your PC, perhaps also running off of an insertable smartphone. They have been very stingy with releasing details, and some of what little we know just came out a few days ago. It has two front facing cameras so AR is at least a possibility. We know much less than we don’t know, not even the price.

Also brand new is the HP Reverb. While at the higher end in price, it wins on resolution, with an impressive 2,160×2,160 in each eye. Unfortunately, it is based on Windows Mixed Reality platform, which is not as popular or as sleek as the competition. The games come from the sparse Microsoft store rather than from the much larger SteamVR and Occulus stores. A little research on Google will show you how to make it work with Steam games. Access to lots of games means higher adoption and eventually lower prices. Let the gamers fund the R&D so we can enjoy better VR porn at less cost. It still has a slight screendoor effect, but much less than any other headset on the market. It has the sharpest display available. It is also tethered.

Freedom of movement is probably of less interest to those who just want to watch VR porn. For the future, though, I expect to see some amazing VR porn environments and innovative interactive video.

Making interactive content out of actual video is difficult. Doing it with AR is probably not practical. The future will probably focus on more realistic avatars, those that are controlled by other players and those that function with artificial intelligence. Researchers are working hard to create more realistic looking animated people. Researchers from Facebook Reality Labs (FRL) have developed a new system called Codec Avatars that gives VR users the ability to interact with others while representing themselves with lifelike avatars precisely animated in real-time.

While video games have managed realistic looking characters and movement by having actors put on motion tracking and facial tracking rigs, this has not been possible at the low end for the home consumer. What FRL has done is use cameras mounted on the headset to do facial capture. They use an artificial intelligence technique based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) that performs consistent multi-view image style translation to automatically convert HMC infrared images to images that look like a rendered avatar but with the same facial expressions of the person wearing the headset.

Of course, people will figure out how to use this technology for sex. You will be able to have sexual encounters with other people who can appear any way they want to. The next step will be more sophisticated teledildonics, the remote and interactive operation of sexually stimulating devices. Incorporated into the actions of an avatar, this would allow for actual sexual stimulation within a virtual world.

In the FRL tech, it is still a complicated process to create a realistic avatar, requiring a studio and a lot of expensive equipment. The idea is that you would step into one of the already created realistic avatars. You might, for example, step into a remote controlled Riley Reid. Voice technology has advanced dramatically, and you could probably even talk in her voice. This would make gender swapping in interactive VR possible. They are working on creating easier tools to make an avatar of yourself at home, but that is a ways off. For porn applications, having a different body has its own specific appeal. I also suspect that we may see virtual cam girls.

Of course, real sex involves a lot of stimulation all over your body. Recreating that is probably a long ways away. Still, when real sex is not available, this could well be the next best thing.

Augmented Reality (AR) has been much slower to take off, despite being pushed by Microsoft. Does it realistically have possibilities for adult entertainment? We’ll look at where we are and where it is going next month.