As you are all no doubt aware, Apple officially announced their long-awaited VR/AR headset yesterday – the Apple Vision Pro. Although with a hefty price tag, even higher than had been rumored, it is unlikely to transform the VR porn market overnight, it does contain some trully revolutionary tech that will eventually be total game changers for XR porn. In this article, I will briefly highlight the most exciting aspects of the device. You can watch Apple’s official promo video for it below.
*Update – The Apple Vision Pro has now gone on sale (Feb 2024) and I have published a guide on how to watch VR porn on it.
First off is the incredible display. The Vision Pro headset features a custom micro‑OLED display system which Apple claims features 23 million pixels, which is more than a 4K TV. Watching movies with the headset, and working with screens, was the biggest selling point Apple put forward for the device in their presentation yesterday. They even highlighted how good the headset is for watching 3D movies. Although the virtual reality experience wasn’t prominent in their reveal, it can be taken for granted that VR porn would look amazing on that display – assuming of course Apple wont try to restrict porn viewing on the headset.
Watching VR porn should be far more comfortable on the Vision Pro than on anything available today. Not only because of the sleek and lightweight design of the headset (the battery is not in the headset but in your pocket connected via a lead), but because of several features it boasts. Thanks to a dial on top of the device, you can easily increase or decrease the level of immersion, handy if you need to see where you are as you adjust your position, reach for a tissue, or switch on a sex toy. Secondly, the lack of controllers and intuitive and accurate gesture tracking (including eye tracking) means that your hands are freed up for other purposes. Then there is the super powerful next-generation processor that will make streaming even ultra-high-resolution VR porn smooth and flawless.
But it’s the passthrough feature of the Vision Pro, which has clearly been positioned by Apple foremost as a mixed reality headset, that carries the most exciting and revolutionary potential for porn tech fans. The passthrough has been reported as better than that of the Meta Quest Pro, both in clarity and in the way it can accurately mesh the virtual or augmented with your real environment. With ‘passthrough porn’ already proving quite popular on even the Quest 2 with its primitive low resolution B&W camera system, then we can be sure that it’s going to be perhaps the standard way to view VR porn on the Vision Pro. That dial I mentioned earlier, which allows you to easily finetune your level of immersion, will also prove very useful for optimizing the viewing of passthrough porn scenes. Currently, SexLikeReal is the only site offering passthrough porn videos. But given that the Meta Quest 3 will also have high-resolution color passthrough, I would not be surprised if by this time next year, most or all of the top VR porn studios offer each of their scenes in both normal and passthrough formats.
The Vision Pro passthrough will also truly kickstart AR porn, and not just because of the passthrough and the AR features of the display. The headset has a camera on its front that allows wearers to ‘record their memories’ in 3D. According to RoadToVR, whose journalists attended the Apple event and got to try out the headset, the camera records in 3D volumetric. That means you should be able to view what you have captured with the camera in augmented reality, and move around the subject, just as with the volumetric scanned models of Naughty America’s RealGirlsNow and 3DUncut.com. The camera could also be used to record VR porn, and perhaps even top studios will see the benefit of using the Vision Pro to shoot their videos. Not only would the resulting VR apparently be volumetric, and thus much more immersive than today’s 3D stereo VR porn, but it would make the scene more natural and comfortable for both the POV male actor and the actress to film. One remarkable feature of the headset is that others can see the face of the person wearing the headset.
The RoadToVR journalist explained just how good this the volumetric video capture feature is.
And here’s the thing; I’ve seen plenty of volumetric video demos before. This isn’t a new idea, not even close. The thing that’s novel here is that everyday users could potentially shoot these videos on their own, and readily watch, share, and store them for later. On other headsets you’d need a special camera for capturing, special software for editing, a player app, and a sharing app to make the same thing happen.
One further feature of the headset worth noting is that it is capable of far more realistic avatars than Meta currently boasts. These ‘digital personas’ are intended for FaceTime chat in virtual or augmented reality. If these could somehow be used for NSFW purposes in XR chat or VR porn worlds and games, then the potential is clearly endless.
Here’s a summary list of the importance of the Apple Vision Pro for XR porn :
- A more comfortable viewing experience for VR porn, with a sleek headset, no need for controllers, and ease of dipping in and out of passthrough.
- High tech passthrough for mixed reality and passthrough porn.
- The ability to record volumetric video for AR porn and POV VR porn.
- Eye tracking, as well as realistic avatars, that could potentially be exploited for XR porn games and sex chat.
Finally, although the Apple Vision Pro, priced at $3499, is not expected to sell much more than a few hundred thousand units at most in its first year, don’t disregard the nearterm impact it yet could still have on the VR and AR porn market. Although the numbers of buyers will be small, they are wealthy, tech savvy individuals, for whom a $249 lifetime membership of a VR porn site such as VirtualRealPorn is absolutely nothing.