When amateur adult performers Damien and Diana Soft have sex, the Apple Vision Pro stays on.
Porn is one of the few types of content—possibly only rivaled by video games—that people use VR headsets for today. It’s been that way since the 19th century, with erotic stereoscopes and spinning peep-show kinetographs capturing people’s imaginations more than 100 years before we started strapping computers to our faces to watch a blowjob in 4K. But the barriers to entry for amateur pornographers trying to get into VR porn are high.
The Apple Vision Pro is expensive, and for a while after launch, no one could figure out how to get porn to play properly on the $4,000 headset. But it turns out the easiest way to get porn onto the Vision Pro is to record it using the Vision Pro itself. The device records natively from inside the headset, and is a lot cheaper and less cumbersome for performers than wearing multiple DSLRs on your head while trying to stay hard.
The Softs filmed their sex life as a private hobby for years, they told me, but mid-pandemic, they needed the money that online sex work could bring in. In 2021, they joined Onlyfans, followed by PornHub and Fansly.
"We knew from the very beginning that the headset would create a barrier to our usual intimacy. Diana likes to look into my eyes when we have sex, not the digital eyes that gaze back at her from the headset, or worse, the ominous, pulsating glow that means it’s recording."
“About a year after Diana and I started sharing our sex tapes, I began to wonder if any real-life couples had ever attempted to make VR porn… and quickly found it was almost non-existent,” Damien said. The VR porn content he found was highly produced, with the budget and time for expensive cameras and editing processes. Authenticity and amateur content is wildly popular in porn, and the VR offerings coming out of studios struck him as fake. “This isn’t completely the fault of the VR studios, but the nature of virtual reality in its current state. It’s hard to be intimate when there’s a huge camera in your face, you have to stay a certain distance away from it, and it can’t turn side to side or it’ll make viewers dizzy,” he said.
They rented a Canon DSLR and dual fisheye lens and upgraded their computer to handle 4K video, and while they produced some videos they were happy with — the potential for VR was “mind-blowing,” Damien said — they didn’t stick with it at first, due to the expensive gear, complicated workflow, and small market for VR content. But when Apple announced the Vision Pro in June 2023, it caught their attention.
“The fact that the headset had built-in cameras was a big incentive, but the thing that finally sold me was that the iPhone 15 already had the capability of taking spatial videos,” Damien said.
“We bought the AVP on release day knowing full well we probably wouldn’t make our money back... but we were determined to inject some real-life intimacy into the world of VR porn.”
They use an iPhone 15 Pro Max to record many of their videos, using an app called Spatialify that records 3D videos for the Vision Pro. But the headset’s native camera has better depth, they told me, so they prefer to record straight from the headset.
“We knew from the very beginning that the headset would create a barrier to our usual intimacy. Diana likes to look into my eyes when we have sex, not the digital eyes that gaze back at her from the headset, or worse, the ominous, pulsating glow that means it’s recording,” Damien said. When wearing a VR headset while banging starts to feel absurd, they laugh it off and keep going. “Luckily, this approach has made it easier to move past the barrier, and when I rewatch the videos, the silliness quickly turns into our usual intimacy and the layer of artifice dissolves.”
They’re also getting tips and hacks for recording in the headset from their fans and other VR enthusiasts on Reddit. Someone told them to put a Post-It note inside the headset as soon as they remove it to keep recording and stop the sensors from pausing the camera. “This means we’ll be able to get the depth offered by the AVP without needing to wear it. Of course demand is high for POV content, so we’ll go back and forth between headset and camera depending on our mood,” Damien said.
Samantha Cole
The device only weighs around 22 ounces, but that’s plenty when it’s strapped to your face, especially if you’re trying to fuck with it on. Immediately after it launched, modders set to work making headband options that improve the stock bands Apple provides with the headset, and the Softs use a second knit band from Apple, and the 3D-printed SoloTop from PrototyperNick on Etsy.
“The results have been amazing for my big head, but we’re still trying to find the right fit for Diana,” Damien said. “This is part of the reason we don’t have as much female POV content as we’d like, but we have a smaller solo knit band on the way and we’re hoping it makes things comfortable enough for her to wear during sex.”
Most of what’s out there currently in the world of virtual reality porn is iterations on male point-of-view content, where a woman walks into a room, maybe does a little strip tease, then the viewer watches a blowjob or she rides him. This is because male POV porn is incredibly popular, but also because filming VR porn is hard: It’s typically done with a heavy camera rig mounted over the prone partner’s face, and they need to be relatively stationary to keep the camera steady and not disrupt the shot or give the viewer motion sickness. Pornographers have been trying to solve this issue, with varying-to-horrifying results, for years. Fucking with a headset on is still incredibly strange, but it still constitutes a major leap forward in DIY VR porn production.
But the awkwardness of sex with a VR headset on turned out to be the least of their challenges. The lack of compatible porn on the Vision Pro was a big one, so they decided to distribute their content through as MV-HEVC files sent in a zip folder, which work on Apple’s device, and side-by-side file formats, which work on headsets like the Oculus. To sell those, they set up their own website, where people could buy them through Stripe and Paypal.
This is, of course, where the next big hurdle came in. Stripe and Paypal are incredibly hostile toward sex work—a lesson many platforms have learned, whether they’re “porn sites” or not. Gumroad just effectively banned almost all adult content, and Wishtender, a site for sending gifts to dominatrixes, recently had to switch payment providers entirely because of Stripe’s discrimination against anything even vaguely sexual. Damien and Diana told me they sold 80 videos in two days before Stripe and Paypal shut them down. They found a new bank, but that process, too, was arduous.
“I had to update the age verification on our website, create new pages for a privacy policy, refund policy, USC 2257, and terms and conditions, sign several documents along with photos of our IDs, share all the sales we made in the few days we were online, talk on the phone with the underwriter, and so much more,” Damien said. “A week into the process, I learned another one of the bank’s requirements: our website wasn’t allowed to have links to OnlyFans, PornHub, or any social media accounts. Since the entire purpose of our website is to serve as a hub between the various platforms, this was a big problem, and the only way to fix it was to create an entirely new, link-free website from the ground up.” It took 122 emails and over a month to get approved by their bank, they said.
“After going through the entire process of creating and selling VR sex tapes, it’s incredibly clear why more amateur content doesn’t exist. The upfront cost is very high and there are road blocks at every step of the process,” Damien said. “Ultimately, the Apple Vision Pro is a huge step toward more homemade VR porn. It simplifies the filmmaking aspect immensely. And although the editing process I outlined is a pain, it’s infinitely easier than working with the Canon camera only two years earlier! Plus, more and more platforms are slowly incorporating VR players which, in turn, are becoming easier to use.”
