Sales of virtual reality headset devices are expected to explode in the next 5 years, with up to 25 million predicted to be sold in the year 2020, and sales doubling each year until then to reach that total. The claim was made in a report published this week by Business Insider magazine.
Last year Facbook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, which earlier spent over a billion dollars acquiring the Oculus VR company, had predicted that he expects sales of the device to reach 100 million units within 10 years.
“It’s hard to predict exactly,” he said, “but I don’t think it’s going to get to 50 million or 100 million units in the next few years. That will take a few cycles of the device to get there and that’s kind of what I’m talking about.
“And then when you get to that scale, that’s when it starts to be interesting as a business in terms of developing out the ecosystem. So when I’m talking about that as a 10-year thing, its building the first set of devices and building the audience and the ecosystem around that until it eventually becomes a business.”
When Virtual Reality finally arrives, you can be sure that virtual sex and porn will quickly follow with it, if not actually drive its mainstream adoption in the manner of VHS video and even, some say, the internet. However, there might be obstacles on the path to VR Sex heaven. For example, the VR headset manufacturers may take a dim view of their devices being used for porn and may even take steps to make such use difficult, especially if the public are whipped into a moral panic with lurid tales of teenagers becoming addicted to ultra-realistic virtual worlds of smut and filth. Despite these possible problems down the road, there are already commercial porn sites catering for the Oculus Rift alone, with the device still in development and owned by Facebook, not know for its tolerance of porn (unlike its support for gore and beheading videos).
