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17th March 2017
03:04pm GMT

Sony PlayStation VR is one of the biggest VR players in the gaming space (Photo by Tomohiro Ohsumi/Getty Images)
Alexandre Tomic (L) at a gambling industry event
The immersive aspect is both the biggest benefit and the biggest challenge in the growth of VR, and the porn industry has joined the gambling world in learning what needs to be done differently.
"The feedback is very important,” admits Clos, adding that BaDoink’s audience is far more responsive and helpful than one might expect from your usual porn message board.
“People will write 20 lines to review the scene - what they like, what they don't, and what we’re seeing is they want more of a girlfriend experience. They want 10 minutes teasing, the girl talking to you, watching with her eyes, more kissing, more contact, the girl whispering, whereas with normal porn you don't think this is going to work.
“When you watch a 2D video you're a mere spectator. We're putting all our videos as PoV so you're at the centre of attention, but at the beginning you notice you've got the guy moving the arm and touching the girl so we’ve received feedback telling the guy not to move anything. I'm there and I see an arm that is not mine moving around, so from now on we have the guys sitting or lying down without moving the arms.
“Some of the directors who are shooting for us, we have had to teach them how to shoot on VR because it is quite different. You can't move the camera because you get motion sickness, we tried to do a smooth cut but you can't do it because it breaks the immersion - it's all about immersion so if you break that it won't be a good scene. You have to teach them a little bit, teach them not to zoom any more or pause on something. The user has to discover things for him or herself.”
But Tomic has expressed concerns that the VR experience could yet become too immersive, meaning a balance has to be found.
This could come in the form of regulation, with some mentioning the need for a clock in the corner of the screen to remind users that the reality they are experiencing is not their own, but he recognises that the level of immersion we already see within less actively immersive gaming experiences could open a door to some very interesting eventualities in the gambling space.
“When I used to play GTA I would take my car, put some music on and drive on the highway near the beach and look at the sun in my car, listening to music. I live in Barcelona, I have a car - what the fuck are you doing? Just take your car and do it in real life!” he says with a smile.
“But there are theories that VR is creating false memories - when technology is so immersive it is very difficult to distinguish it from reality in the moment. Let's say in the moment you can distinguish it from reality, if you add time after that and you look at this moment as a souvenir, the more time goes the harder it is to distinguish it from reality.
“The only thing that makes you distinguish it is that you remember your entry point. But the next super-game might be to not know you're playing a game.”
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The parallels with console gaming have not gone unnoticed, and Harrison suggests this could be an area from which gambling can learn.
“Doing more to fold story progression and gesture-based control into gambling titles could make the experience more immersive,” he says.
“They could even put the player into animations and use all the motion sickness-inducing elements that make VR so noteworthy. Console games are really doing some exciting things with VR (look at Alien: Isolation) and it’s this sort of immersive experience that the gambling games should be looking to emulate.”
This ability to artificially focus attention on the user is something which porn has already been able to utilise. The addition of connectivity with toys is something which Clos expects to follow by the end of 2017, while 3D models could yet be the next step.
However, greater and more realistic immersion brings new problems, which is one of the reasons why - as Harrison acknowledges - there will likely be extreme scrutiny of the gambling industry when it comes to ensuring minors are protected from exposure to the games in question.
“Gambling is always going to attract a lot of regulatory scrutiny and a major issue will be the worry that these products may disproportionately appeal to children,” he says.
“There was a lot of noise about social casino games acting as a 'gateway drug' to gambling - which was never proved - and bitter experience suggests there may a similar hand-wringing about VR."
Above that, Tomic recognises, there is the concern about ‘post-VR sadness', outlined by The Atlantic last year - a sense of detachment when leaving the virtual world for our reality.
“If you spend 10-15 minutes in VR, it's fine. If you spend one, two, three hours, then you start getting into this new world, but the first thing that happens, that everybody experienced, is the motion sickness. It happens because the eyes perceive a movement and your ear doesn't.
“Then people say this is a problem for why people won't go into VR, but you know what happens? You get used to it. But when you get used to it that means you get unused to something else, which means you go into VR, you spend hours, you don't have motion sickness any more, you feel very immersed, and then when you take your goggles off it's a little complicated to get back your normal senses and everything looks less bright. It doesn't look so real.
“It's deeply related to gambling. Gambling is a way to involve the player more in the game; if you play a poker game without money it's boring, and if you put money on top of it you get involvement.
“Take a normal video game in VR, then take a video game in VR where you don't know you're playing a video game - you would get more involvement, you will really get into the game and feel the things.
It could yet prove to be the case that the main obstacle facing early adopters of VR isn’t prohibitively expensive technology, and indeed the correlation between this expense and the amount of investment a user has in a product can lead to improved communications that improve the product much quicker than with something more naturally mass-market.
Instead, perhaps we should be looking at the race between technological expansion and user tendencies which often comes with any technology where the companies themselves are learning certain things as they go.
Just as previous iterations of VR showed themselves to give users a very different perspective from what they can expect now, we may yet learn that the state of VR in 2017 correlates very little with what we will see once it becomes more widespread outside the industries in which experimentation is already taking place.
Clos says we haven’t yet found the limit of what VR can achieve, and what we can achieve within VR. But by getting in early, those in porn and gambling may be better placed to take advantage of a healthy industry once it properly takes shape.Explore more on these topics: