It’s an old adage that any advance in technology – be it the advent of film or the invention of the VCR – will soon be applied to pornography. This seemed to be the case at SXSW, where a panel discussion had the subject VR Porn: Future is Upon Us, What’s Next?

Virtual reality headsets were available for use by a giggling queue of delegates. The Guardian put one on. In the real world, I was fully clothed in a conference hall. But in the virtual room I could see a glass-walled room with two giant egg-shaped sculptures outside, and a woman crawling on all-fours in front of me. Looking around, I could see other parts of the room: looking down revealed a naked lower half, to which the woman was attending.

As an experience, it was more bizarre than erotic, but VR porn is gaining a highly engaged following of fans. Now 2D porn is not enough – they want to feel as they are in an imaginary world having sex with fantasy women. Eventually, some suggest, “teledildonic” technology will enable them to feel sex as well as see it, though a strict patent, according to delegate Ela Darling, has prevented technological developments in this area.

At the moment, virtual reality porn is largely aimed at heterosexual men. Dinorah Hernandez, the content manager for BaDoinkVR, a subscription site which includes virtual reality scenes, says that she soon discovered that users of the site did not want the male actor to make any sounds, or to touch the female actor, the better to preserve the illusion that she is having sex with them. “People are requesting less sexual positions and more eye contact and dirty talk and being close to the camera,” she said.

However, her fellow industry insiders agreed that as VR grows in popularity, porn will be made aimed at female and gay audiences. “The market is males,” said Hernandez. “We have released scenes from female perspective, and got a bashing because it’s a ‘gay scene’. But one user said his wife enjoyed it.”

The panelists said there are two kinds of virtual reality porn: recorded material and live, where “cam girls” interact with users who are wearing headsets. Darling, co-founder and star of a virtual reality porn site VRTube.xxx, who claims to have pioneered holographic porn, makes the latter type. She said her users value the “intimacy” of the experience over the sexual content, with some telling them about their real-life woes.

She said VR porn actors needed to offer a psychotherapeutic element to their performance, saying: “When you’re in VR you feel like you’re in the same room with this person, and if the artifice is apparent then you feel like you’re with a hot girl and she wants nothing to do with you.” Users, she said, “experience that enough in their real life”.

Fabien Grey of AliceX, another site which uses virtual reality for users to interact with women live on camera, said VR porn users are more engaged: they are four times more likely to return to the site, and spending six times more money than on a regular “cam show”. “It has to do with an emotional bond that a user is prepared to build up,” he concluded.

Hernandez said although watching porn is usually an impulse, her users needed to invest a lot into VR: ordering a VR viewer, wait for it to arrive in the post, then waiting 20 minutes for the sizeable film to download. She said people would be prepared to pay for VR porn in the way they are still prepared to pay for concert tickets – because it is an experience.

“Users are very enthusiastic for the medium,” said Darling. “A lot are developers themselves. They’ll give you a lot of feedback. They’re excited to be on the cutting edge of this new thing. Users develop a relationship with it at a very accelerated pace.”

The panelists said while VR companies would never publicly endorse the use of their technology for porn, tacitly they know they need the adult industry’s support. Darling said Oculus, the VR company bought by Facebook, whose headset the Oculus Rift launches next week, had been “tacitly supportive”. It can be plugged into a normal browser, meaning it can be used for porn.

VR technology is still new, and will soon look primitive, the panelists said, detailing the various technological challenges they have had to overcome. Grey suggested that soon augmented reality technology (AR) will be used with VR, meaning that a porn star would appear to be in your bedroom – or any other scenario the viewer chose.

Grey said: “A feeling of total immersion will hit the market, you can have this experience of being there will the model. It’s scary because people can get lost in these worlds. As the screens get closer and closer to our eyes, people can dive into these worlds for hours.” The VR screen is placed about two inches from viewers’ eyes – a challenge for those filming porn.

The panel discussed “teledildonics” including sex toys that respond to commands and gloves that will feel as though you are touching a person. Grey said that we are, however, a long way off finding material that can replicate the warmth and pressure of human skin.