When Einstein published his equation E=mc2, he couldn’t have imagined that it would lead to him becoming the father of the atomic bomb, but, like s*** versions of King Midas, humans have a history of taking breakthroughs in science and tech and using them for nefarious purposes. When virtual reality experienced its first boom in the early 1990s it didn’t take long for a link between VR and drugs to be established. VR was imagined by some as a kind of electronic LSD, but the technology was rudimentary and the ‘trip’ was dissatisfying, so much so that an early innovator of VR technology, Peter Rothman, commented that “If only VR was half as good as LSD we might have something”.

But now VR is back and this time it has the power to immerse you in different worlds, to transport you to different realms and to put you slap bang in the middle of a porno. The technology may have changed, but our desire to use it to fulfil our hedonistic desires hasn’t.

Not that that’s a bad thing. After all, were it not for porn we’d probably all have been watching movies on a Betamax, online payments wouldn’t have taken off when they did and no-one cared about the internet until there was porn on it. Porn pioneers technology, so why wouldn’t it be at the forefront of the VR movement?

Porn has pioneered new technologies and drugs fuelled early Silicon Valley software culture, so porn and drugs are one thing, but what happens when people start engaging in immoral behaviour when they have the VR headsets on? Any gamer will have already carried out a few unspeakable acts (there’s no way to play nicely with a rocket launcher, Rockstar Games), but, with VR, users will be immersed and implicated in reprehensible acts like never before.

If morality campaigners have a problem with violent movies and video games in their present form, what will happen when VR is added to the mix and people move from being mere spectators to willing actors carrying out violent acts?

Sex

When the musician John Mayer said in an interview with Playboy that “there have probably been days when I saw 300 vaginas before I got out of bed,” he inadvertently highlighted two really interesting points. Firstly, rock stars clearly don’t count sheep to get to sleep, and secondly, internet porn is everywhere. The whole world is now a couple of clicks away from every sex act imaginable.

Porn has embraced technology like no other industry, so while major film networks are still desperately trying to cling onto revenues from Blu-rays and DVDs, porn is online and free (although most pornos could learn a thing or two about production quality from the film industry).

Even Playboy has been forced to drop nudes from its pages because its centrefolds can’t compete with the treasure trove of online porn. Given its history, it’s unsurprising that the porn industry has positioned itself front row centre as VR becomes mainstream, and it’s even less surprising given that VR porn is forecast to be the third-biggest virtual-reality sector, behind videogames and sports-related content.

The Queen of VR porn is current porn star and VR porn developer for the live VR webcam platform CAM4VR, Ela Darling. She says that while comparisons with the way VHS became popular (basically because it could be used to play porn) are farfetched, hardware developers like Oculus would profit from embracing VR in the same way that VHS did.

“I think that VR will benefit greatly from allowing porn to grow and thrive within it,” says Darling. “People want to access porn on their devices and they will find mods or hacks to get naked bodies on their screens no matter what. If they embrace the porn industry, or even just passively tolerate us, they’ll find greater adoption from consumers.”

Darling says that her experience of VR porn spans most areas, and includes 180° 3D video, 360° 3D video, holographic porn and a dating simulator, plus she’s about to launch her second platform for VR camming with CAM4VR. But while VR has clearly progressed from its early crude technology, if it is to really penetrate the porn industry and for it to properly replicate being in a room with a porn star don’t you need, ahem, your hands and haptic technology? Darling doesn’t seem to think so.

There will always be ways to make the experience even more immersive, but I think the current state of VR porn is thrilling

“It’s incredibly immersive when it’s done well and alienating and weird when it’s not,” says Darling. “The first time I saw our live VR webcam platform for myself, I was hooked. It takes a common experience and reinvents it in a way that maximises all the best attributes. There will always be ways to make the experience even more immersive, but I think the current state of VR porn is thrilling.”

VR porn is an immersive experience thanks to the work Darling and her contemporaries have done, but the more authentic VR porn becomes, the more it will come up against questions of morality and decency. But for Darling, VR porn is an outlet for people to try things they wouldn’t in real life.

“I think it’s a great thing. Bringing opportunities to people who wouldn’t otherwise access them increases the user’s parameters of empathy and broadens their world view,” says Darling. “I think that VR will allow people to enjoy a myriad of rich, new experiences which will impact the way they interact with the real world and the people around them.”

And how does she feel about people that she doesn’t know and will never meet having sex with her in VR? “It makes me feel powerful and successful. People can connect with my image from anywhere in the world and experience my work in an intimate, personal way and I think that’s incredible,” says Darling.

Drugs

To feel truly immersed in VR software, developers will have to create engaging content, and haptic technology may have to catch up. But there is another, simpler, option: drugs.

Online groups like r/RiftintotheMind are full of tales of people experimenting with VR and drugs, and it makes sense that people have turned to stimulants to boost the immersion factor of VR, as people have been doing this with movies and music for decades. At least, it makes sense until VR immersion can fully replace the sensation of being on drugs.

“I don’t think VR is quite there yet that I would consider it a whole different experience when it comes to videos games,” says redditor Unreality Journeys. “It’s more like an add-on to your current experience but not exactly a new and totally different experience. The immersiveness is just not there to feel [like you’re] totally there and your brain is only partly tricked into thinking you are in another world.”

Unreality Journeys says that the drug he experiments with most is DMT, which is a hallucinogenic that causes similar effects to LSD or magic mushrooms. But Unreality Journeys isn’t just using drugs to enhance VR; he’s a Howard Hughes figure, making content designed to enhance the buzz people get from using drugs in VR, and analysing his own and other people’s reactions to different types of videos and drugs.

“When it comes to things like acid people react better to things that are colourful with trippy images and sound,” says Unreality Journeys. “I have a video I made using 360° photographs from the inside and outside of a few different mosques in Iran. The image changes after about 30 seconds to another one. The music is very tranquil and makes you feel like you are exploring a new world.”

Like VR itself, using drugs with VR is still in its infancy, so not every experience is like being inside the mind of Hunter S Thompson. “Tripping inside VR added an extra sense of wonder about the technology, but it also made me more aware of the screen door effect and the fact I had a large device on my face” says r/RiftintotheMind moderator jonesRG. “LSD makes working with technology more difficult. Text is hard to read, you lose some dexterity in your fingers and technical problems seem to be more common.”

Using drugs while strapped into virtual reality is one thing, but eventually you may not need drugs to expand your consciousness. VR will be able to do that on its own, and Unreality Journeys, and others like him, are already working on that technology. Although, they’re not quite there yet.

“For a while I was trying to figure out if I could use VR to give all of one’s senses the same sensations that one gets during a particular drug trip,” says Unreality Journeys. “Watching images and listening to sounds that would be similar to a ‘good’ drug experience was enough to give me a similar high feeling.”

The VR black hole

No platform or device can give a home to sex and drugs and expect everyone to be cool with that, but even before porn embraced VR, the technology has been mired by questions of morality. When VR first looked destined to seep into the public’s consciousness, in the early 1990s, people questioned whether it was right that people could be immersed in hyperviolent environments. So it’s no surprise that now VR is back, so is the morality debate.

Up till now VR’s immersive experience has been limited to reproducing sex scenes and drug taking, but what happens when the technology transcends that and indulges some of humanities worst appetites? What happens when you can, for instance, kill people in VR?

With every new technology people have to learn its potential, its possibilities but also its boundaries

“That’s something that I’ve been wondering about for a long time because I remember in the 1980s seeing young children playing these arcade games where they get to stab people or shoot them and wondering: it’s very different from seeing that in a movie and acting it yourself,” says Prof and Dr Philip Brey, of the University of Twente in the Netherland’s department of philosophy.

“I wondered what does that do to people, to basically live a life in virtual reality that is very different from the life that you live in the real world. Children’s games do involve a lot of role playing, but with virtual reality the role playing becomes very real, to the point where it becomes difficult to distinguish it from reality.”

VR’s greatest selling point is that it can transport people to new realities, and while that could do wonderful things for areas like education, training, communication, cooperative work, entertainment and healthcare, I don’t imagine the tagline ‘ever wondered what it would be like to kill someone? Find out in VR’ will ever prove popular.

But are questions of morality warranted? VR is more immersive and requires users to participate, but essentially it’s the same debate that was had about violent movies and videogames, and does virtual reality inspire violent acts any more than those other mediums?

“The evidence of causal connections between violence in the virtual world and violence in the physical world is inconclusive, as far as I know,” says Brey. “There are studies, for example, that suggest virtual violence may make physical world violence more likely, but there are also other studies that haven’t found that connection, so it’s hard to argue conclusively one way or the other.

“However, it’s not all about the simple causal connection of course. This is a very difficult issue because there are people on both sides, some saying obviously the kinds of actions and depictions in virtual environments will reinforce how people act in the real world, and there are others that say that’s not the case, but the empirical evidence is simply not conclusive either way.”

Being able to put anyone, anywhere is VR’s great power, but that ability will become a stick to beat it with if the alternate realities created are viewed as seedy virtual worlds. Porn and drugs have done so much for technology and they’ll continue to contribute to the development of VR, but if the technology does ever supplant our actual reality then we have to be discerning about the kinds of virtual realities that are built.

As Brey says: “With every new technology people have to learn its potential, its possibilities but also its boundaries. The breakthrough in the consumer market is about to happen and it’s only at that point that we really have to learn how to use that medium in a way that avoids the excess and negative consequences and emphasises its potential.”