The future of porn is in your living room

Andreas Hronopoulos wants to beam strippers into people’s living rooms — and after a few years of tinkering, he thinks he’s finally found the tech to make his x-rated version of the Star Trek holodeck work.

Hronopoulos is the CEO of Naughty America, an adult entertainment studio that has been experimenting with augmented and virtual reality for years. In 2018, Naughty America launched one of the industry’s first augmented reality apps for mobile phones, which allowed people to superimpose adult models over the camera view of their phones—kind of like Snapchat filters, but with fewer clothes. However, mobile AR turned out to be not much more than a gimmick, something people may try once but quickly forget about.

Then, in October, Meta debuted its Quest Pro VR headset. The $1,500 headset comes with the ability to combine holograms and other virtual elements with a video view of the real world, thanks to a set of cameras strategically placed on the outside of the device—an implementation of AR that’s also known as mixed reality. Hronopoulos bought a Quest Pro as soon as it came out, tried it with his company’s 3D content, and had a bit of a lightbulb moment.

“Oh wow, that’s the product,” he remembers himself thinking. “Augmented reality is here.”

From cam sites to VR porn

The adult entertainment industry has long been an early adopter of new technologies. Some of the first video streaming sites and subscription businesses on the internet were broadcasting pornography. Services like Twitch were preceded by adult live cam sites. When the first consumer VR headsets were released a decade ago, porn studios were among the most enthusiastic early adopters.

VR headset makers like Meta don’t like to talk about the popularity of adult entertainment on their devices. However, video viewing has long been one of the most popular activities on VR headsets. “Immersive media is absolutely one of the top three applications,” said Oculus CTO John Carmack, who has since left Meta, during a keynote speech in late 2019. While there are family-friendly films produced for VR, many headset owners sooner or later turn to adult videos.

Naughty America began recording adult VR videos in 2015 and has been churning out new clips for VR headsets every week since. Many other studios have followed suit, in part because they can charge viewers more per clip than for other types of content. “It’s become the premium adult entertainment experience,” Hronopoulos says. “There is real money in this.”

Technical challenges

Compared to VR, adult AR is still in its early days. Naughty America recently relaunched its AR site Real Girls Now (adult content, not safe for work), which features short clips of adult performers dancing around stripper poles and striking other suggestive poses. Hronopoulos has so far recorded a total of around 50 minutes of footage in a specialized holographic capture studio, with dozens of cameras positioned around a performer to film her from every angle. “It’s a very complicated process,” he says.

The process also comes with built-in limitations. One of them is that even the best camera arrays can’t capture anything hidden behind another object or person, a problem that’s known as occlusion. That’s why Real Girls Now generally features single performers who don’t get too close to each other. “We are not doing sex scenes on Real Girls Now,” admits Hronopoulos. 

That’s why his company recently also launched an AR site called Virtual Sex World (adult content, not safe for work) that uses animated characters instead of real-life performers. Not only does animation allow for more explicit fare, but the simpler production process also makes it possible to upload new content more frequently. “You can be a lot more iterative on animation,” Hronopoulos says. He believes that these two approaches to AR cater to different preferences. “We are looking to see what people want,” he says. “There is definitely a market for both.”

That market remain nascent, to be sure. Meta has not released any sales data for Quest Pro, but the company has primarily been targeting professionals and prosumers. The same is likely going to be true for Apple’s much-rumored mixed reality headset, which will feature pass-through video and a reported $3,000 price tag. Meta also enabled pass-through video on its much cheaper Quest 2 headset last fall, but those devices only come with low-resolution, black-and-white outward-facing cameras, resulting in imagery that looks a bit like scenes from the movie Blair Witch Project.

Giving viewers agency

Adult AR could receive a big bump later this year, when Meta will release the next version of its consumer VR headset. That device will support mixed reality with color pass-through video similar to the Quest Pro, with a much more affordable price tag. Ultimately, companies like Meta and Apple plan to sell lightweight AR glasses. Hronopoulos is banking on that future, and he thinks AR technology has the potential to change fundamentally how people consume and interact with adult entertainment.

Today, adult videos tend to follow a fairly standard script, with cameras capturing positions and body parts meant to appeal to the video’s respective audience. AR and VR have the potential to shift some of the agency from a video’s director to the viewer, as Hronopoulos first noticed when he began showing off his company’s VR videos at industry conventions years ago.

In VR, viewers aren’t necessarily looking where a camera would have focused, according to Hronopoulos. “They want to look into the eyes of the models,” he says.

AR offers a chance to take a viewer’s agency to another level. Not only can viewers beam a model into the familiar surroundings of their living rooms (or, let’s face it, bedrooms), they can also walk around them, choose their vantage point, and ultimately become more active participants in their own fantasies.

In other words, as Hronopoulos says, “It’s going from watching to experiencing.”