Virtual Reality Could Transform Pornography But There Are Dangers – IFLScience

Judging by the statistics, a lot of people must have received virtual reality technology for Christmas. Views of virtual reality pornography on one website spiked at 900,000 on Christmas Day 2016, three times what they were a month previously. Today, daily views are almost 250% higher than a year ago.

Virtual reality porn has arrived and with it has come the potential to create whole new immersive experiences. Aside from the headset devices available today, further developments could mean not just 360-degree 3D graphics but also technology that replicates taste, touch and smell.

This new use for virtual reality has been greeted with some of the same moral panic often seen when digital technology impacts sexuality, such as children being exposed to internet porn at a younger age or teenagers sexting each other explicit photos. While these are serious concerns, its worth remembering that every new sexualised use of technology has been threatened to corrupt childhood innocence, from the introduction of mainstream cinema to video tapes.

My colleagues Gavin Wood and Madeline Balaam and I have just published a study into how people might use virtual reality to access pornography as the technology develops. Several media reports focused on the potentially negative uses we highlighted, such as creating revenge porn and consent issues. But we also found that virtual reality has the opportunity to create new, more positive ways of experiencing pornography.

For our study, we asked participants to write a story about an imaginary character called Jack who was about to have his very first virtual reality pornography experience. By analysing the stories, we identified two main themes, one positive and one more worrying.

Some stories illustrated a perfect scenario that completely immersed Jack in a euphoric sexual experience that was beyond his wildest dreams. The seemingly limitless imagination that can be applied to VR porn experiences could potentially open the door to a whole world of new sexual experiences.

But some of the stories also portrayed Jacks experience as precarious, something so good that it started to take over his life or replace his real relationships. This suggests that virtual reality could affect not just pornography but also disrupt the ways we typically think about sex in real life.

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Virtual Reality Could Transform Pornography But There Are Dangers - IFLScience