Virtual Reality

VRThere was a semi-porno film about Virtual Reality included in Seattle’s recent HUMP amateur porn festival. In the short film, a 20-something-year-old man adorns himself with the special Virtual Reality Goggles, and gets transported back and forth between his Virtual World in which he cavorts with a young nymph, and his lonelier reality in his room, grabbing at the air for nothing, looking absolutely ridiculous in the process, which is one of the downsides of VR.

Susie Bright’s imagination about Virtual Reality takes the concept a few steps further in her VR chapter in “Sexual Reality”. The sex writer visualizes herself in a dream body, perhaps with a tail (sounds like this Reddit thread here) or by confronting her sexual taboos, which she unfortunately fails to specify. After reading a few of her books,  my guess is that Susie Sexpert’s actual taboos more than likely have a much lower thresh-hold than the majority of the American population.

Some of the potential problems with VR, as perceived by Susie and her friends, are that the lines could easily become blurred between fantasy and reality. If you are alone in your room “having a moment”, you know where you are and what you are doing, but conceivably, if you are in the VR realm, you could conceivably become confused between fantasy and reality. The question then becomes how far can someone push the metaphorical envelope without having an increasing drive to create the same situation in reality.

Of course, I’m not quite sure that the technology has caught up with the fantasy of Virtual Sex. A quick web search yielded some interesting finds, but nothing that I’d be likely to try. As a sampling, one site gives you instructions to place a device on your penis, choose a girl, and experience your new Virtual Reality. Although I’m not a dude and unable to test this one out, I’m not quite convinced that this is a probable reality.

In the meantime, some people are worried about the consequences regarding online Virtual Worlds such as The World of Warcraft and Second Life, which apparently at one point had a location called the Playground where adults used child avatars for consensual sex. On one hand, sites like these can disengage people from reality, but on the other hand, can give people a place to vent inappropriate desires.