Ela Darling calls herself the “Queen of VR porn” as she co-founded CAM4 and became the first virtual reality cam girl from VR tech integrations that her company developed. She shared her founding story with me in a previous interview in 2015, and I talked with her at VRLA last year about their latest technological innovations of doing 360 video livestreams, the degree of emotional authenticity and connections that are being made, creating an immersive space that’s a reflection of her geeky personality, and her challenges of being the chief curator of adult content, and talent scout for adult entertainer/VR enthusiasts.
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Darling says that being a cam girl in VR is about 20% sex and 80% therapy, and that the customers who are participating in these live show thrive on the emotional intimacy that can be cultivated within VR. They’ve created a safe environment that’s free of judgments and shame around any sexual kinks or mental health taboos. We talk about why she sees gaming as more of a driver of technological innovation in VR more than port, but that there are still some innovations that are happening.
There’s also a lot of VR porn content that’s already been produced, but that the CAM4 livestreams focus on immersive experiences that can’t be downloaded because they’re live and interactive. There’s a quality of emotional intimacy and connection that goes way beyond what 2D on-demand video content can provide, and that people have been willing to pay to have these experiences. The porn industry still has a number of cultural taboos, but Darling has so many canny insights into human nature as she’s engaged in dialogue with so people who feel liberated from sexual shame and mental health stigmas.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. My name is Kent Bye and welcome to the Voices of VR Podcast. So pornography is something that people always tend to think about when they think about new technologies and what people are going to do with it. And of course there is pornography within virtual reality. My sense is that what VR porn is going to look like and how it's going to evolve looking at the unique affordances of VR is going to be a lot different than what most people could imagine or expect of what it's going to be like. Actually, I think there's both extremes of what's going to happen in terms of the teledidonics or the haptic experience, but I think I just think that there's going to be something that's going to be qualitatively missing or different, that that's not ever going to necessarily replicate what it's like to be intimate with another person. Actually, that level of intimacy is something that was a trend that was emerging over and over again in this discussion that I had with the self-described VR porn queen Ella Darling, who started the cam for VR a number of years ago and has been probably one of the leading cross-sections of the adult film industry with virtual reality technologies and I had a chance to talk to her back in 2015, um, in episode 175. So you can get a little bit more of her origin story there, but here, we just got this update in terms of what's happening in the world of virtual reality porn and how it's kind of evolving into something that is much more intimate and live and interactive with the specific context that she's working with, with this cam for VR platform that they're creating. So we'll be covering all that and more on today's episode of Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Ella happened on Saturday, April 15th, 2017 at the VRLA conference in Los Angeles, California. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:56.704] Ela Darling: Hi, I'm Ella Darling, and I am the VR content manager of Cam4VR. My business partner and I co-founded the first adult live webcam platform for virtual reality, and I'm the world's first VR cam girl, as I probably mentioned the last time we spoke. But we've got some cool stuff going on now, and I want to tell you all about it.
[00:02:15.142] Kent Bye: All right, yeah, what's going on?
[00:02:17.084] Ela Darling: So we launched Cam4VR about a year ago. And since then, we have created a brand new camera. It's our 2.0 camera. It's got a much larger field of view, and you can get as close as, like, six to eight inches from the camera itself. So it's a very intimate, very personal, very memorable experience. You can speak voice-to-voice directly with the person that you're watching in VR. And this can be a one-on-one private event. It can be one-to-many, where up to five people can talk at a time, and the broadcaster can choose who gets to speak. And I'm really excited about it. We basically create a 3D 360 photosphere, and then we live broadcast a video on top of that. So it immediately captures and stitches a super high-res 3D 360 sphere. And yeah, it's super awesome.
[00:03:00.716] Kent Bye: MARK MANDELSSONGEN Interesting, yeah. There's been a discussion here, and I think you may have been a part of different discussions of asking questions to Palmer Luckey in public forums. But there's a lot of people that would say, oh yeah, porn is going to really revolutionize VR. I usually push back and say, no, I think it's actually been gaming that's been really revolutionizing a lot of the technology. But yet, I think you're starting to talk about these types of technologies. It sounds like there could be kind of an adult context. But yet, there is a lot of innovation that's happening. in these one-on-one, intimate cam girl spaces where you're starting with one-on-one interactions, but there's so many more different applications. So this may be one of the first real true innovations that I've heard coming from porn coming back into VR. I don't know if you've heard other things.
[00:03:48.413] Ela Darling: So it's this tedious thing that people always love to say about how porn drives technology, and porn is always the first to do different tech things. And that was true once upon a time. And I've sort of pushed back against that myself, because the reason porn used to be able to do that is because porn had purchasing power. People were actually paying for it. But when was the last time you, not you personally, but just on a grander level, you or anyone you know actually paid for porn consistently? It's just not something that people really do anymore. But what we're seeing in VR is that people are actually willing to pay for it. People still want to find cheap workarounds, but people are paying for this content. And porn is an industry where we constantly iterate and we constantly produce. When you compare the porn industry to the mainstream film industry, most porn films, even the big productions, are produced on a fraction of what even a short film is going to be made on. Many, many productions have a budget of about five grand, usually less than 20 grand. and they have to produce content very quickly and keep making it. And we're seeing that in porn. So I would say that in terms of just content, there's probably more VR porn content available than any other content. Because we make it and we produce it and we get it out so much and so frequently. But I do agree, gaming is what has driven VR. Gaming is what has put it in people's hands. It's what brought sponsors to the table and financial backers. Gaming is the key experience, I think, or at least initially. And I don't think that's a bad thing. When porn is the driver of any experience, it starts to become taboo and stigmatized and people are afraid to use it. So yeah, porn is definitely pushing some tech developments. Hopefully we can get porn back up to being as cool as it used to be or as strong and powerful. But if not, I'm just happy to be in the space right now.
[00:05:30.636] Kent Bye: Yeah, and as I look at the evolution of technology, I sort of have these number of different statements that I say. And one of them is that we're moving from the information age to the experiential age. So we're moving from a place where we used to look up and have content available, but now with the experiential age, with VR, and especially with live streaming, I think, is part of that trend that we've seen. Coming back to a lot of the live streams with Twitch, but also with eSports, and I was talking to Jon Root today, and one of the things that he said is that part of why he thinks VR eSports is gonna be so popular is that we live in an Amiga ecosystem where there's so much video on demand, where you download it and you watch it at your convenience. But yet, the one things that people don't really do that for yet are things that are live events, like sports, or in your case, you're having these different cam girl sessions. So I'm curious to hear from your perspective, what are some of the dimensions of that live experience that you see make it so compelling that people would want to have that in a VR experience, rather than downloading something and watching it at their own convenience?
[00:06:36.894] Ela Darling: The difference is exactly that. It's experiential. You can always watch something later, like you were saying, but you can't repeat a lived experience. You can't download what it's like to really talk to someone that you are interested in, or who you idolize, or who you are Someone you care about later like that is something that like this conversation right now between you and I I could listen to your podcast all day long but there's nothing that replaces this one-on-one actual connection in real time and I think that's a big part of what drives it because the difference between porn and live cams is that With live cams you have a real sense of reciprocal interest and intimacy there's human connection that you just don't get when you're watching a pre-recorded video and
[00:07:18.906] Kent Bye: And so I haven't had a chance to see any of these live streams, so I don't get a sense of what the beginning, middle, and end of what actually happens. Maybe you could kind of just run through a paradigmatic example of one of your sessions and kind of what happens and what is happening both from you as a performer, but also on the technology side, what's happening.
[00:07:38.119] Ela Darling: So as a performer, I would set up the camera, do my photosphere, and then go online and broadcast. As soon as I'm online, people would start coming into my room. And typically, we see the best results when a performer is on for about three hours. They spend the first hour or so sort of building up the people in the room and getting them excited and fostering a sense of community amongst those people in the chat room. And the entire time, you're engaging. You're talking to the camera. You're looking at the camera. You're trying to make people feel as though they have a true connection with you. And with Cam4 VR, the performers will set like token goals. So it's sort of this like crowdfunded sexy experience that everybody throws in a little bit and then once the performers reach the amount that they feel is fair for the show that they have proposed, then they do that show or whatever it is that they want to do. It's very much driven by the performers. They choose their race, they choose what they want to do. I think agency is incredibly important in anything, but especially when it comes to anything regarding sex work.
[00:08:35.075] Kent Bye: And so it sounds like there's a bit of a cooperative element here, where the more people that are there and the more they're kind of chipping in, the more kind of exciting, sexy things can happen, it sounds like. So there's kind of an incentive to have that social cohesion there as well.
[00:08:46.619] Ela Darling: Yeah, absolutely. And thinking outside of the adult space, you could kind of have the same thing, where you have, once you get enough people present in the room, then they can sort of guide the discussion based on what most of the people are interested in doing or talking about or hearing about.
[00:09:01.405] Kent Bye: Now, you mentioned audio talking and chatting. I feel like that's a little bit higher level of bandwidth, where you're not able to do as much scale or synchronous communication by many people chatting. You can trace a chat log, but you can't necessarily have 50 or 100 people talking at the same time. So how do you go from the text interface to having these higher levels of interactions through voice?
[00:09:27.148] Ela Darling: So you're absolutely right. It would be incredibly overwhelming to have 50 or 100 people talking all at once. We've paid a lot of attention to social VR in other spaces where you have a certain number of people in a single chat space that are communicating with voice to voice. So we decided about five people would be the maximum that wouldn't be overwhelming and you could still sort of differentiate the people based on their voices. And it is something that The performer can select who's going to be the person who gets to have that talking experience. They can designate who it is that gets to talk, or if anyone does, it could be based on their highest tippers, on their return customers, or just on people who are the most enthusiastic.
[00:10:05.938] Kent Bye: And so I'm curious to hear about the actual locations that you shoot in. I can imagine a photosphere where you go into the same room every day. But for some people, they may find that boring. But yet, you need to have your safe space to really do your performance. So do you kind of move around your own house or location? Or do you try to go to exotic locations that are exciting for people? Or maybe you could talk a bit about that dimension of it.
[00:10:29.529] Ela Darling: So I don't perform that much. I mostly sort of curate the experience and train other performers. I want to give my performers a boost instead of taking the views away from them. When I do perform, it's usually in my bedroom because I have designed that space to be a reflection of my personality and the persona that I've crafted. So when you look around my bedroom in virtual reality, you get a sense of who I am. You see the weird decor on the walls, the skulls. I'm basically like a teen goth kid in the body of someone who's not a teenager. But yeah, so I think it's best when it's in a space that is reflective of the person on camera, because that fosters a much deeper sense of intimacy than, oh, look, we're at the pyramids. You don't know anything about me. You can look at photos. That's a totally separate experience. I think the best case here is being in a space that makes people feel that they're achieving a higher level of connection with you. If you're in my bedroom, that's a very, very close space. I mean, that is the closest you can get to the physical representation of my identity, because I've designed it. I've crafted it for your consumption.
[00:11:35.292] Kent Bye: MARK MANDEL-DOMINGUEZ. Yeah. And for your platform, are you curating your performers? Or is this something that's kind of an open-ended that anybody could jump in and start doing this?
[00:11:44.228] Ela Darling: I definitely hear the performers. I only have so much tech to give away right now, so I try to find the people who are going to have the best ROI, who perform the best on the site within the limitations that you're going to experience on the platform, and who are most enthusiastic. I could have a really, really great performer, but if they're not enthusiastic about virtual reality, it's not going to be as cool of an experience. So people who are excited about VR, people who are proven successful performers, and people who are a little bit tech savvy. And you have to have about 10 megabits per second upload speed on your internet, so that's another factor.
[00:12:20.852] Kent Bye: So I've been, you know, having my own sort of brushes with fame within the niche community of VR and, you know, kind of handling that in different ways. But also, I interview people and I sort of have a conceptual mapping of what I keep private and what is public. And I think that the process of cultivating intimacy often is to ask about you know, what are your hobbies, what do you like to really watch on TV, tell me where you're from, you know, like all these things that we share with friends that are personal intimate details. But yeah, it feels like this type of genre is starting perhaps bleed into these, the private lives of the performers. And so And to me, I'm just curious to hear your thoughts on that as you are exploring this space. If you find that as well, if the people that are wanting to cultivate that intimacy, if they're really asking these kind of personalized questions to get to know you, and if that helps them kind of build a connection and get aroused in their experience more.
[00:13:18.374] Ela Darling: People ask the most intimate questions to the point where asking me about my hobbies or what TV I like is completely welcome. I think it's really important as a performer in a space like this to provide a sense of authenticity without demanding true authenticity from yourself. Because I don't think anybody is entitled to your authentic identity or sexual identity or life. But when you're crafting the the person, the identity, the character that you're playing, sort of. You have to invest authentic parts of yourself while remembering what you don't want to give away. And that's going to be different for everybody. For some, it's where they live. They don't want people to know what country they're in, because it could be a safety issue. Maybe they don't want their family to know. For others, the hobbies that I do might be a really easy way to find out my real identity. So I'm not going to tell you I am on this pinball, softball, basketball league. I don't know. I'm making it up. you know, something that could lead you to my real identity would be very dangerous to me. So I think it really depends on the performer to identify where those boundaries are for them and to enforce them just for their own safety and well-being.
[00:14:22.802] Kent Bye: How do you, when you are faced with that, how do you sort of deflect people when they're asking you super intimate personal questions that you actually don't want to answer?
[00:14:30.882] Ela Darling: I used to be really afraid to enforce those boundaries, and I used to sort of coalesce with what people would ask of me, and I felt kind of crappy about it. Now I'm just very blunt, like, you are not entitled to that information, and if, like, and I'll tell you, you know, I just, I'd rather not disclose that, or I'd rather not talk about that. And if someone pushes, I just kind of tell them to fuck right off, because I'm not going to be pushed into sharing something that you're not, I mean, I share so much of myself, my sexuality, my body, like everything. You can Google parts of my body that I'm not even going to mention right now. But I'm giving so much of that that if you can't respect the small parts that I need to hold back for myself and the people that are close to me, then you're not, like, I don't even care. Like, I don't care about your opinion because you don't respect me enough to show any inkling of respect.
[00:15:16.441] Kent Bye: So there's been 2D camming that's been around for a while, and we have VR camming now, with cam for VR. So I'm curious to hear from your perspective, what's new and different with the VR that you can't do in 2D, or just isn't as good?
[00:15:31.858] Ela Darling: It's the feeling, and I have my bingo card of overused VR phrases, and you should probably get your flask ready because I'm going to use a lot of them. It offers a sense of compelling intimacy and presence, and it's something that you just don't get from watching something on the screen. When I'm in VR, I actually have so much more fun as a performer. Even though the actual experience isn't that different, I'm still just talking to a camera. But when I'm talking to a VR camera, and I know that people are watching me in VR, I know that I'm dominating their attention. Everything they see, I've structured for them to enjoy and consume. When they're watching me, they're not on their phones. They're not checking their email. They're not cooking. They're not pretending to work. They are entirely engaged with the experience that I'm providing them. And that goes for the user, too. They have a sense of feeling like my entire sense of attention and you know we live in a sort of attention-based economy where people pay so much money just to have your attention and to give that to someone in an exchange like that it's just it's a very powerful experience.
[00:16:32.504] Kent Bye: Now, I want to get back to this question of intimacy and sexuality, and this sort of erotic experience. Because I feel like this is something that may have started to come up with the camming, with the 2D, where you're already having these one-on-one interactions. But I'm curious to hear from your perspective of what is this connection to an emotional presence and intimacy, whereas there may have been a dissociative component to pornography before, and if that kind of led to something that didn't feel as satisfying for people. Or what do you think it is? about that intimacy that is really making this so compelling?
[00:17:06.204] Ela Darling: I think when it comes to any sort of adult work where you're interacting directly with a person who's consuming your services, so camming, stripping, anything like that, it's probably 20% sex and 80% therapy. enjoy engaging with cam girls and cam performers because it's somebody in the world who's listening to them, who is reciprocating that attention and caring. And a lot of it, I think, you know, there's a really big stigma around mental health in our society, especially with men. And so I think it's sort of a way to maintain that sense of machismo while getting answers and getting sort of a therapeutic experience from someone. A lot of the time when people come to me on cam and they think they're asking for some kind of kinky sexual experience, but what they're asking for, truly, is for me to validate that they can be interested in that and still be worthy of love and affection. And I think frequently the people don't even realize that this is what they're really seeking, but in the end, that's why they keep coming back. I'll have someone pay $8 to $10 a minute to hang out with me in a private room on cam for two hours and have nothing sexual go on. It's just feeling a sense of connection with someone else.
[00:18:24.090] Kent Bye: There's a certain amount of people interacting with sex workers where they feel like maybe they're able to talk about things that are taboo or that they don't have an outlet. There's some sort of stigma around these different topics. If you were to kind of like categorize, what is it about our culture that people can't have other outlets, that they're having this outlet to be able to talk about these different categories, like what those categories are?
[00:18:47.190] Ela Darling: We live in a very oppressed society sexually. I grew up in Texas. The sex ed I received was don't. So I think a lot of people come from this background where sex is not just taboo, but bad, like you're just wrong. Like, how dare you? Masturbate that's just filthy and horrible. You should be ashamed of yourself people internalize that and Because they internalize it they feel afraid to talk to anyone about it even a therapist What if I say what if I tell me? Therapists that I have this weird kink and she decides that I'm like certifiably insane and I need to be locked up because I'm a terrible person even people who do engage with me on cam have this huge sense of shame sometimes that I kind of have to talk them out of because it's fine like This is the world I live in you're not going to scare me off with your sexual ideas or fantasies like this is I'm an expert, I'm a pro, you're fine. It's just like talking to your doctor about health issues. I think that's how people view sex and sex workers.
[00:19:42.196] Kent Bye: Yeah, it reminds me of the work of Brene Brown talking about shame and how you kind of deal with that. And I think that there is a lot of shame that's in our culture. And it sounds like what I'm hearing is that, and I'm just curious to hear what you hear from your other performers and sort of other trends that they see in terms of the types of topics and conversations that you're kind of hearing other people talk about.
[00:20:04.764] Ela Darling: The topics are incredibly broad. There are so many different things people want to talk about. Sometimes they want to talk about the crap going on at their office and how their boss is busting their ass and something like that. Sometimes they want to talk... I mean, I have a lot of people... I'm really invested in nerd culture. I go to... I mean, I'm here and many other things like this. People love to talk to me about cosplay, about Comic Con, about VR, about tech, about things that they think are cool and they feel cool that there's, you know, a pretty girl that they can talk to about it because they don't... have that experience very frequently. For some of my performers, Leila Savage is one of my big VR performers. She's got a bunch of katanas on her wall and she's like, I think she's like a trained security guard, so like she'll do like sword moves and stuff. Really, I mean people just want to feel engaged. They want to feel like they're truly experiencing a special moment with you that when they walk away you're going to remember it too.
[00:20:55.501] Kent Bye: Now, in terms of regulations, the law, in terms of how this is regulated, in terms of, obviously, the performers have to be of certain age that you can verify. But in terms of the other side, the customers, do you have to go through a verification process to say, OK, this person's actually this age, and it's not some minor who's getting access to your system?
[00:21:14.058] Ela Darling: I don't really work on that side of it, but there are a lot of checks in place to make sure that there aren't young people engaging in content they shouldn't engage in. That said, young people are really, really good at accessing whatever it is you don't want them to access. And I think it's incredibly important for parents to talk to their kids about the content they might come across, to encourage them to avoid something that they might not be ready for developmentally, and to prepare them for a time when they might come across something like that. You need to monitor what your kids are doing on the internet. It's hard, but parent, just parent your children. That's really, really important. I am not prepared to teach your children about sex. That's something that you really need to talk to them about because they're probably not going to get it at school and they don't need to get it from me. I do not make content for minors and it's a group effort keeping minors away from this content.
[00:22:04.638] Kent Bye: In terms of the technological roadmap, it seems like volumetric video or perhaps even like CGI is a dimension where you have a volumetric sense, but yet you miss out on the facial expressions and the whole performative aspect of, you know, there's something that I think is lost when you go to CGI, especially when you're talking about this sense of intimacy and emotional presence and micro-expressions. I think we're at least five or ten years away of having really amazing micro-expression capture, facial expressions, all that stuff. But for you, is that something that you're looking at in terms of other ways of creating immersive environments that people can be embodied into the experience and not kind of use the abstraction of text and chat?
[00:22:45.195] Ela Darling: I haven't done much work in CGI. Volumetric capture is really cool. We played around with it a little bit, but it's just really hard to scale right now, especially for the kind of content that I'm creating, where we want to have a variety of performers available throughout different times of day. It's just really hard to scale that across continents. So I would love to look into that a little bit down the line. We're just not quite there yet. And I completely agree with you about microexpressions. I've been very impressed with some of the eye tracking technology that I've seen at SVVR, but it is still a ways away.
[00:23:15.263] Kent Bye: Yeah, so for you, what do you want to experience in VR?
[00:23:18.584] Ela Darling: Oh, man. What do I want? I want to experience Rick and Morty, like right now. 420 is too far away. I don't know. Every time I try a new VR experience, it reminds me in some way of what I love about this space and this industry. I tried a game yesterday. It was like this meta VR game where you're using VR in VR, and it's like this sort of inceptionist, It was fun. It wasn't without its issues. But when I walked away from that, I was like, wow, I love virtual reality. I love it. I'm so happy I'm here. And I forgot. I didn't even realize that I was sort of feeling a little bit dejected. But man, it's so nice. Every time I try something new in VR, I love Robo Recall. I'm really excited. My roommate's been hogging Arizona sunshine, so I'm going to have to go pry that away from him. But just all of these cool experiences are brilliant. I love the social VR platforms that are available right now. I don't feel very engaged with them. And so that's sort of what's inspiring me to create a different kind of social platform that is a little bit more photorealistic where you can really see the expressions on someone's face.
[00:24:20.518] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I think that's the key emotional presence I think is the what I would call that in terms of both the environments that's there but also having connection to other people in a way that you get these subtle non-verbal body language cues as facial expressions and stuff and I think that the work that you're doing you're really I think pioneering a lot of that emotional presence in VR and I think that's A lot of people will look at 360 video and they'll kind of dismiss it as being non-volumetric, it's not interactive. But yet, from my perspective, when you look at narrative and film and actors and the work that you're doing with CAM4 VR, that you're able to actually achieve that level of emotional presence. Emotional presence has so many different other applications in terms of building trust with therapists. I think it's a dimension where I can see it really branching out. And finally, what do you think is the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what it might be able to enable?
[00:25:17.174] Ela Darling: Oh, man, that's a heavy question. What is the ultimate potential virtual reality? I don't even think we know yet. I think we're still so early in the game that that's going to reveal itself after we see greater adoption. Like, I think we're going to we're going to look at how the consumers end up using this and not just the gamers, but like the really the bulk of people who are going to end up using virtual reality. I think they are going to be a big driving force in the way that it's applied. I think social interaction is a really big one. I think we live in a time that it's very easy to isolate yourself from other people. I very rarely leave my house. I mostly interact with one person and my dog and the internet. I love it. It's not a problem for me. But I am always transported when I do a social experience in VR that connects me with other people who I wouldn't connect with just based on geography or mutual interests. So I don't know. The very, very long answer, I don't effing know. But I'm excited to find out.
[00:26:13.846] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, thank you so much.
[00:26:15.107] Ela Darling: Thank you so much, Kent.
[00:26:16.638] Kent Bye: So that was Ella Darling, she's the self-described VR porn queen as well as actually she won the XBIZ crossover star of the year and the company that she's been working with has been Cam4VR. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that first of all That statistic that she gave about how the adult performers were spending about 20% of their time doing things related to sex, whereas about 80% ended up being about this sort of more therapeutic context and exchange where people just wanted to be heard, they wanted to be seen, they wanted to be validated. And so in some ways, they've created this private context under which these people just feel like they're comfortable in order to be able to actually share these intimate aspects about their lives that they feel like maybe the culture is not necessarily accepting of, especially when it comes to shame around sexuality, but also around mental health issues. And so mental health, there's a lot of stigmas around getting labeled and then that label becomes a part of your identity. And actually, you can have a lot of discrimination around that. And if you're dealing with different various mental health issues, then we're in a culture where there's not a lot of support to be able to actually deal with that. I think in a big part, it's largely like we're such atomized into our own experiences and that when we actually have this sense of social connection and cohesion, it actually makes us feel better in our mental health. And so I think actually virtual reality is gonna have this huge impact of allowing people who feel otherwise very isolated in their experiences, being able to actually connect people and to relate to them in a way that they're able to make their mood feel a lot better. I definitely see this in different social VR experiences like VRChat, and Nell is reporting that as well, in terms of these different clients that are interacting with her and the different performers on these platforms, that they're able to feel connected and create that level of emotional intimacy. And I think that level of emotional intimacy is something that people are willing to pay for. And it's a live experience. It happens in the moment. It's not something that you could download and look at. It's something that you have to actually experience. And so as we're moving from something that is more consumption of information in the information age, this becomes now about having an interactive and participatory experience that can only be happening once. And so that requires other people to be there co-present at the same time and to be able to dynamically react to you in the moment And I think that in the trends of pornography, I think that's one trend that I see that that's something where people are able to actually pay for because they see that they can't get that anywhere else, that level of live interaction. Now, obviously, there's a whole other areas of pornography where there are that download on demand. And, you know, I think that there's been a lot of content that's being generated. And just in talking to different people like, you know, Samsung, for example, they'll have these things where they say, well, you know, one of the biggest applications that we have is the web browser. And it's sort of like, well, what is happening on that web browser? And I expect that some of the big applications of What people are doing in some of these mobile VR headsets is that they are looking at these different pornographic experiences But I think that in general what Ella is saying is that there's just a lot of taboos and shame around sexuality And so it's just something that isn't really openly talked about and I have actually a very hard time getting hard numbers and statistics and data into you know, how much This is pervasive out into the VR community, you know being a driver within the industry of virtual reality But I would suspect that what Palmer Luckey as well as Ella has said is that you know pornography isn't necessarily really the technological driver of innovation within the VR community. I mean by far it's been the game developer community especially with these high level GPUs and the hardware that people have and it's just like the experiences that are out there that are really driving people to adopt virtual reality have been gaming by and far is like the leading indicator of the adoption of virtual reality technologies. And then after that, I'd say that there's a layer of medical applications, enterprise applications, architecture, engineering, design, as well as this whole training. You know, education is something that has been huge from the very beginning, from the military, is what VR has been used for. So there's this whole, you know, just concept of a living story and something that's happening in the moment and then you have to actually, you know, be present and be there with other people. And that those types of experiences, even if you record it and watch it later, it's going to be a lot different than if you were there and you have the ability to, like, make choices and take action and then have that action actually be received and be responded to. So I think those are some key components that I'd say is pretty universal across all the different virtual reality environments. It's like this concept of the lived experience or the living story, something that's emergent, and you have to be there. And if you record it and watch it later, it'd just be way different. So there are lots of fascinating things, lots of really interesting insights, and I'm looking forward to see how this evolves over time. I suspect that the adult film context is something that may be leading into these other broader changes within our society, which is, you know, providing these new opportunities for emotional intimacy and connection and finding these more therapeutic aspects for how this technology can be used. So, that's all I have for today, and I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast, and if you enjoyed the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a donor to the Patreon. This is a listeners-supported podcast, and I do rely upon your donations in order to continue to bring you this coverage. So, you can donate today and become a member at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.
