When Howard Rheingold wrote Virtual Reality over twenty years ago, speculating about how digital technology might create totally immersive on-line virtual sex, the possibility of enjoying multi-sensory copulation with some remote entity on the internet seemed wildly implausible. Sexual encounters were confined to textual exchanges, often pseudonymous, in obscure chat-rooms. The technical obstacles to creating convincing ‘teledildonics’ environments seemed insuperable.

Now the technology for immersing you in at least two of the sensory realms, sight and sound, has arrived in the porn industry market-place. At the recent XBiz adult entertainment conference in London, they were all talking about the Oculus Rift Virtual Reality Headset, which according to one delegate ‘could make previous forms of adult entertainment obsolete.’ Presumably the effect is like sticking your head in a hologram, enclosing you totally in the virtual sex world of your choice.

There remain the challenges of digitally processing touch, taste and smell, such crucial elements of the erotic experience. But writers have been playing with the virtual reality trope for some time, exploring such possibilities and speculating on their consequences. M John Harrison in his superb novel Light evokes a seedy twenty-fifth century spaceport where a burned-out space pilot lets his life drift away in a virtual reality tank, sustained by ‘a mucoid slime of nutrients and tailored hormones.’

Virtual Sex Settings

In Paul A Green’s Beneath the Pleasure Zones the punters at Pleasure Centres plc struggle into tactile body-suits and neuro-sensitive helmets to experience scenarios based on old porn clips that have been automatically selected for them based on the aggregated information held by the Lobe, an alt.universe version of the Web. William Burroughs, in a 1985 essay, even considers encounters with partners who are totally synthesized.

‘You can get fucked by Pan, Jesus Christ, Apollo or the Devil himself. Anything you like likes you when you press the buttons.’ Burroughs also enthuses about potential settings for virtual sex, including a pirate ship, a 1910 outhouse and a Mongol tent. ‘It’s ready built, waiting for you…’

Multi-sensory virtual sex, whether with an algorithm or with a VR-suited human partner, seems a long way off. The problems inherent in digitally mimicking a caress or the perfume of a woman’s hair seem insurmountable at present, and the physical consequences of software or hardware malfunction could be alarming.

But the emergence of even duo-sensory virtual sex in the porn sex industry raises some questions about the way our culture might be evolving. Sexual fantasy has always energized society, both positively and negatively. Yet does the sexual solipsism of the head-set – ‘sex-in-the-head’ – take us a little bit further away from human interaction, with all the messy unpredictability that ultimately makes the act of love so exciting and rewarding?

I think so – but it all depends on what sort of a future we want. Some of the trans-humanists, like Ray Kurzweil, a prophet of post-human Singularity – when the contents of our brains are all uploaded into computers or even merged into some kind of super-consciousness – will see the Oculus Rift Virtual Reality Headset as one small step in our inevitable mutation into Hyper-Real Digital Beings. I don’t want to spoil anyone’s fun but I have my doubts…

Saul Wolfe’s latest novel is Space Virgins of the Third Reich