Jamie F
Shortly after the Apple Vision Pro headset was released in early 2024, people began complaining about not being able to watch VR porn properly on the device, which was Apple’s first mixed reality headset.
The $3,499 headset was lauded for its high-performance and passthrough capabilities, but some people said that watching web-based VR porn on the Apple Vision Pro led to problems, perhaps due to interface compatibility issues.
However, in early April 2024 VR porn site VirtualRealPorn [NSFW] noted that as long as the WebXR API was enabled on the Apple Vision Pro, and the device didn’t have any anti-porn filters on, it should then be able to handle VR or AR porn without hassle.
“The Apple Vision Pro can play 180 and 360 videos like any other HMD [Head Mounted Display). It is only necessary to have installed a player that allows to play 180 or 360 format,” a spokesperson for the company told us.
Now, a few months on from that initial fluster among VR porn users, VirtualRealPorn claims to be the first platform to make VR porn videos tailored for the Apple Vision Pro’s spatial computing technology, and has already released some on its platform [NSFW].
The site promises “unparalleled” immersion and interactivity in the Apple Vision Pro-focused videos. It appears to be working on allowing movement from the viewer in porn scenes, such as their hands being visible through AR/passthrough abilities.
VirtualRealPorn has a short demonstration video on its site, showing what watching one of its VR180 videos via the Apple Vision Pro can look like. It shows how the video is brought up by the user moving their hand, then the user’s hand is also briefly shown in the full-vision porn video.
This ties in to the spatial computing capabilities that have been lauded in the Apple Vision Pro in the months since its release. The tech company has been keen to push the ‘spatial computing’ phrase as the preferred name for its capabilities, incorporating its AR passthrough.
The main thrust of this is a near-seamless blend of the virtual and ‘real’ worlds, as seen through the Apple Vision Pro. What this can potentially mean for VR porn videos is being able to see your hands move around a porn model’s body, or perhaps in future other parts of your ‘real’ anatomy.
VirtualRealPorn has not released full details about how it tailors VR porn videos for Apple Vision Pro’s technology, although the company did tell us that, currently, most of the ‘secret sauce’ is added in post-production, and focused on the possibilities of a parallax effect by using the MV-HEVC (Multiview High-Efficiency Video Encoding) codec.
“The MV-HEVC codec offers stereoscopic encoding and allows, in AVP [Apple Vision Pro] environment applications, not only to be able to see a stereoscopic video but to have a slight parallax. A small degree of motion,” the company explained to SEXTECHGUIDE.
The MV-HEVC when applied to standard rectilinear video (2D video) results in a window in front of us that’s stereoscopic and has a slight parallax. The more interesting proposition though, of course, are 180-degree and 360-degree videos.
“For [180-degree content] it is necessary that the player can read the spatial format. Or that the spatial applications update their players for the reproduction of content in180 or 360-degrees. At the moment, if you play a 180-degree spatial video in the AVP [Apple Vision Pro] it does not play as a hemisphere because there is no player that plays 180-degree spatial – although they are on the way. But [currently] it plays in front of you, and in its full screen format it is very interesting and immersive,” the company added.
With the Apple Vision Pro costing around seven times more than the (often discounted) $499.99 Meta Quest 3 (or more than three-times the price of the Meta Quest Pro) it may be a while before these high-performance headset-specific VR porn videos become common.
However, we’ve quickly gone from Apple headset owners panicking about supposedly not being able to watch VR porn at all, to platforms making videos tailored specifically for the headset. So, we can probably expect the Vision Pro’s role in tailored VR porn to expand rapidly.
