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If Ames and Gunn were making conventional porn, then she might not be getting so close to the camera lenses, cooing into them as though they were a lover’s ears. If they were just making your standard wham-bam-thank-you-surgically-enhanced-ma’am porn, with three Xs but only two lousy dimensions, then the CEO of the company bankrolling this shoot might not be sitting downstairs, having flown here from Barcelona just to be around. And there definitely wouldn’t be a “clinical sexologist” overseeing the shoot, making sure that the action unfolds in accordance with maximum therapeutic value.
But this is VR porn—in which intimacy is the watchword, eye contact is everything, and studios are sensing money-making potential the likes of which hasn’t been seen since the internet came along and almost cratered the whole damn industry.
Todd Glider never meant to get into porn. Back in the mid-1990s, he was the living embodiment of the mid-1990s: a 20-something with an MFA (“pipe, tweed jacket, all that,” he says), living in San Francisco, making zines. Then his girlfriend got a job in Los Angeles, so he started looking for employment in Southern California. One of the listings he saw asked for an “HTML programmer.” He got the interview and the job, but “HTML programming” turned out to be “writing erotic copy for an online adult company.”
BaDoink—and by all means, take a moment to enjoy that glorious name—released its first VR porn scene in the summer of 2015; the company was profitable within a year. It’s gone from 10 employees to more than 90, a workforce that is “overwhelmingly coders,” Glider says, sitting in the living room of the Encino house. He’s sturdily built, with a shaved head and a gregarious mien, and is dressed like he’s heading onstage to talk to a crowd of tech developers: dark gray button-down, black pants, Apple Watch. That’s not unintentional. The way Glider sees it, VR has the potential not just to make porn profitable again, but to make the tech world respect the adult film industry. “This is the first time I feel like we’re leading in any way,” he says. “Silicon Valley left us in the dust, but now adult is carrying the torch.”
Historically, the desire to see naked people doing naked people things has driven the widespread adoption of otherwise niche consumer technology. VCRs, CD-ROMs, and even streaming video owe much of their early, uh, market penetration to the fact that they made watching porn more convenient and more private.
