Written for the feedback section of the mouthorgan piece on virtual reality sex . People were talking about practical applications, but practical applications never lead a technology.
The technology will have to be amazingly good to overcome the issues of distance. I know that I've cultivated some friendships with e-mail exchanges, but hate telephone calls and rarely find them productive; even in non-sexual contexts neither of those comes close to sitting at a table talking over a meal. And just in the most solved problem, graphics, we're nowhere near presenting convincing humans even with rendering times hundreds of thousands of times slower than what we'll accept as reality, so I don't expect that we'll have convincing distance human interactions in a virtual 3d space any time in the next decade or so.
And my experiences with mechanical aids thus far has been that the emotional sides far outweigh any possible changes to the physical experience.
But to paraphrase someone at ILM (who was talking about "photo realism" in movie special effects), we don't go to virtual spaces for reality, we go there for surreality.
Since porn drives the entertainment technologies (VHS and the web are the two tired examples that everyone trots out) it doesn't take a whole lot of foresight to see that much the way people go to the blockbuster effects movies to see things that cannot be, the initial applications of "virtual reality" technology to sex will be experiencing altered social and perceptual spaces. To some extent this will mean places where socially inept guys with questionable hygiene can get laid, but I think there'll be a large number of participants from the "furry", goth/horror and similar communities, people whose sexuality draws on themes along the lines of Salvador Dali or H.P. Lovecraft tinged with Beatrix Potter.
(As I think about it, given the current prohibition on depicting child sexuality, the Beatrix Potter or Richard Scarry tie-ins seem even more likely).
Like most entertainment media, this won't hit the mainstream, the couple trying to survive a long-distance relationship or what have you, 'til way past the fringes are done with it.
Tuesday, April 20th, 1999 danlyke@flutterby.com