BENGALURU: Back in the late 90s, Angie Rowntree was vexed by the complete absence of made-for-women porn on the web."When I'd talk to my male peers about my idea for starting a porn site for women, they all told me 'women don't watch porn' or 'there's no market'. My personal favourite was, 'Women are not visual'," recalls Rowntree, who went on to start sssh.com — amongst the first porn sites catering to a female audience — in 1999.Seventeen years later, Rowntree hasn't just proven her male peers wrong but is also convinced that "there definitely is a market, and it is growing". Part of the reason for the portal's growth is also the way it has adopted cutting edge technology like virtual reality and ultrahigh definition cameras. "VR (Virtual Reality) in the adult industry is our fastest growth sector in years," said Rowntree, adding that India is the fourth largest market for the portal.Virtual Reality is not just dragging viewers to the portals but is also solving a fundamental problem that the industry has faced for years now — getting them to use their credit cards. "It's giving people a reason to pay for porn again. The experience is leagues beyond content you would find on a free site," said Ian Paul, CIO, Naughty America The porn industry has always been an early adopter of cutting edge technology. "They began building websites, which attracted traffic, which then made it worthwhile for non-adult websites to be built. As traffic grew, adult sites developed innovations like online payments, optimisation of websites, video streaming, etc," says Frederick Lane, author of the book, 'Obscene Profits: The Entrepreneurs of Pornography in the Cyber Age'. But then, with 2008 came the age of the "tubes" — portals that were inspired by the success of YouTube and hosted free content largely stolen from paysites and studios.Customers got used to free sites and stopped paying for porn. VR, adult business producers like Rowntree believe, can change the tide again. "VR is the current game changer and at which point the technology of live video sex on VR headsets becomes available, a whole new world opens up," says Rowntree, adding that the immersive technology can take adult storytelling to new highs."If the performers walk up a hillside, you get to follow them up, and look at the grass beneath your feet and the sky above you. You also get to see what’s behind you. There's an amazing freedom of movement." Another significant upgrade that the porn industry is making is the move to 4k video. Unlike the traditional 1080p videos, 4k resolution videos have four times more pixels on the screen which results in lifelike, crystal clear videos."Over the past year, we have begun shooting all of our original erotic movies for women and couples in 4-6k on Red cameras," says Rowntree. Similar cameras were used to shoot Hollywood sci-fi blockbusters like The Martian and X-Men Apocalypse.However, most of these giant leaps in tech for porn-kind is happening abroad and not in India. The reason: like Pavan Duggal a cyberlaw expert says, under the realms of the IT Act in India, it is illegal to publish and transmit any obscene material in any electronic form. Duggal though adds that watching porn in private is not punishable under any law in India.Given the high quality of videos, would a user have to wait forever for the video to download? Naughty America's CIO Ian Paul says that his team uses cloud technologies across connected data centres to host their website and uses and a Content Delivery Network (CDN) for video delivery. Simply put, a CDN is system of distributed servers that deliver webpages to a user based on his or her geographic location.As for the future, interactivity is what will drive porn consumers to pay up. Chris Jackson, a spokesperson from Pornhub.com, says that the portal is releasing more integrated "cam shows" with users interacting with models in real-time. "We are building out our platform for smart TVs and we even launched a Roku app for the same," says Jackson.Roku is a streaming media player, which takes content from the internet and displays it on your TV set. Stephen Yagielowicz, a spokesperson from XBIZ, an American publisher for the sex industry, believes that further convergence of cameras and social media will lead to more creative sex films. He goes on to suggest that the tail may end up wagging the dog ie, virtual reality adoption might be driven by driven by porn. "Porn will be the reason they invest in technology, even if they tell their wife — it's so the kids can play the latest games," says Yagielowicz.