"VR is the biggest niche since MILF," Naughty America Chief Information Officer Ian Paul said. "If you want to write it off as just a niche, and it arguably still is a niche, it's a huge niche. It's a niche that's on fire. So it's a force to be reckoned with, and it needs to be watched very very carefully, because it can easily go from being the biggest niche to the mainstream, to the dominant force in the industry, just like that."

To hear Darling and Paul talk about it, the business of VR has come a long way since my gastrointestinal odyssey. According to Pornhub, its collection of 2,600-plus VR videos (up from 30 in 2016) pulls in 500,000 views daily. With viewership and production apparently on the up-and-up, I assumed the user experience had kept pace. So I dusted off my Gear VR and returned to the home of my first time: Virtual Real Gay.

I first came across the site the night before my visit to Kink in late 2015. I wanted to get acquainted with the landscape, but at the time the VR porn market was a wasteland for anyone but straight men with very vanilla taste. Virtual Real Gay was a homoerotic oasis in a sea of fake-and-bake double D's. Sadly, no amount of virtual beefcake could save me from disappointment. The experience was cumbersome, the content was low-quality and the payoff -- well, there really wasn't any.

Two years later -- and, I'm sorry to say -- not much has changed. As opposed to harnessing the true power of virtual reality, letting viewers experience unknown worlds and undiscovered fetishes, the porn industry has decided to stick to what it knows. Straight men are the dominant force in porn purchasing and as a result, the majority of money is being pumped into producing content with them in mind. Kink, for its part, has created a handful of gay, lesbian and trans videos, and Virtual Real Gay's catalog now includes 38 titles. That's better than nothing, but when you consider the user experience and the cost of a monthly subscription, there's not much incentive for the rest of us to buy in.

But what of the experience? For VR porn to really take off, it has to offer something the free, frictionless world of PornHub can't. If firmware updates, sideloading and troubleshooting shoddy software turn you on, you're in luck! For the vast majority of users, however, virtual reality is still little more than a novelty. I recently spent more than an hour trying to load a single video onto my Gear VR. My first attempt, downloading a video directly from Virtual Real Gay to my phone and playing it in the Virtual Real Player (a proprietary beta app), turned into a glitchy kaleidoscope of outsize buttholes, inflated penises and unidentified orange body parts.

My second attempt, sideloading a video and watching on the Oculus player, was a success, but sadly not much more gratifying. As was the case in 2015, poor camera angles, skewed perspectives and bad blocking combined to create an experience that was more nightmare than wet dream. If it weren't for Ella Nova's anus, I likely would have written off VR porn entirely. The spirit of experimentation and innovation I saw at Kink in 2015 and in my conversations with Ela Darling, however, gave me hope that the promise of VR porn was deferred, not dead.

"If you try crappy content on a crappy device, you're going to think VR is crap and you're going to write it off." -- Ela Darling, Cam4VR

When I returned to Kink earlier this month, though, the excitement was gone. In January, the studio announced plans to move production to Las Vegas and focus on less-controversial pursuits at its SF headquarters. It has since sold off its treasure trove of bizarre porn props, bondage equipment and fuck machines in a series of garage sales. The paintings have been removed from the stairwells, and the once-buzzing basement is a ghost town. For now, Kink VR is on hold and Fivestar tells me the fate of her passion project is TBD.

"I really can't say what's next for Kink VR," Fivestar said. "I hope that we keep pushing the technology barrier and going further and further with our content. Unfortunately, I'm not the head of the company, so I'm just waiting for instruction on that. For me, I'm just going to keep experimenting, and as long as I'm learning, I'm having fun. I'm meeting a lot of really great people in the industry who are excited about adult and VR, and I'm hoping to work with them and create experiences like people have never seen before."

As Kink mulls its investment in VR, all eyes are on an industry that two years ago looked like a sure bet. Investment in virtual reality is still going strong, but there are signs of shifting priorities even in the mainstream. A report from Crunchbase found a decrease in funding for VR startups in the first quarter of 2017. In May, Facebook announced it would close Story Studios, Oculus' award-winning content arm, choosing to invest in productions from third parties instead. In June, Apple introduced ARKit to jump-start augmented-reality development, effectively side-stepping VR altogether. Just two weeks ago, rumors surfaced that HTC, makers of one of the most compelling headsets on the market today, might be looking to sell its VR business.

Still, analysts, investors and VR-content creators are quick to point out that the market is in its infancy. In order to create high-quality experiences, producers are often forced to spend tens of thousands of dollars on off-the-shelf cameras or create VR rigs of their own. Creators have to have deep pockets or technological know-how just to get into the game. Once they do, the viewer's experience is largely out of their hands. High-quality headsets like the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift are prohibitively expensive, driving most users to experience virtual reality for the first time on low-end devices like Google Cardboard.

"The proliferation of cardboard devices is great, in that it puts [virtual reality] in the hands of people who would never seek it out themselves, but the downside is that it's the lowest possible quality experience of virtual reality," Darling says. "So, let's say you're trying VR for the first time, and you're trying it on some crappy piece of cardboard that someone sent you, and you download a porn video that is not optimized for VR and isn't a great example of VR content. If you try crappy content on a crappy device, you're going to think VR is crap, and you're going to write it off."

Ultimately, Darling says, "this is a case of 'you have to walk before you can run.'" She says the next wave of headsets and lightweight, standalone devices like the one Oculus is reportedly producing, in conjunction with inexpensive, user-friendly 360-degree cameras will help push mainstream VR adoption and, in turn, VR-porn viewership. Like Darling, Paul believes it's only a matter of time before VR porn has its moment.

"It's not an if, it's a when," Paul says. "The technology is only gonna get better, smaller, more high quality. At some point in our lives, we're gonna be in some sort of Star Trek holodeck, you know? It's just a matter of time. Even if there's, let's say, more than a lull -- let's say there's kind of a drought, and some of the big manufacturers aren't pushing it as much -- we're still gonna support the technology because it's just a matter of when."

Porn's impact on new technologies is near impossible to measure, much less predict. There's no guarantee that virtual reality will be a mainstream success, no way to know if it can pull porn back from the brink or benefit from the adult industry's carnal appeal. In the end, porn may not be VR's killer application but, at the very least, it's still "the biggest niche since MILF."