All Mode
Grabbing a beer or coffee, or going for a run with a friend have been staples of human social engagement for decades, following on from more traditional means of interacting at markets, town squares, and the like. Today, as COVID-19 limits human movement and interaction, we’re left to look ahead and attempt to lay a grounding for how our species will maintain its social nature while severely limiting in-person contact. For work, leisure, survival, and sex, the COVID-19 pandemic is a real game-changer. Thankfully, so is Augmented Reality.
A New Social Status Quo
Image: A Shanghai train deserted. (USA Today)
Telecommuting to work instead of riding public transport, ordering groceries and supplies online for an impersonal delivery, and avoiding in-person interactions with anyone but close family members and housemates: COVID-19 has removed from everyday life the myriad small ways we would mingle with our fellow citizens.
Whether a simple passing interaction or one that results in continued intimate contact, many of us no longer have the chance actually to meet someone new in the flesh. Even rituals considered by many to be sacred – funerals, weddings, voting – are being radically changed.
An even more significant challenge remains not in your first interactions with a potential new partner, but in consummating the relationship. What does that even mean in our current mode of non-physical connection? Augmented Reality offers many ways to circumventing these restrictions and provide the sexually frustrated and socially limited solid opportunities in times like these.
Intimacy in Isolation
No longer able to find a potential partner at a concert, nightclub, festival, or other group activity for the likeminded, many people will lean back on the online dating and cybersex tools of the late 90s and early 00s: chat servers, messaging apps, and social media. What those tools look like today, though, is a little different from their states during the dotcom boom.
Image: LovePalz interactive toys for couples.
Aided by teledildonic devices and fluid video conferencing, couples can continue their courtship and sex lives remotely. New daters can even do the same, some finding remote dating a more relaxed and enjoyable way of discovering someone new. With AR and VR allowing a more immersive yet still intangible meeting ground, opportunities are even richer, especially when aided by a physically pleasurable device controlled by your individual and mutual arousal. Not surprisingly, sales of teledildonic devices have risen sharply since the worldwide lockdowns set in.
Image: Elena Koshka
Dating Humans, Dating Bots
Anyone who’s found themselves talking back to a VR pornstar mid-scene knows how convincing even a pre-recorded VR encounter can be. Streamed in real-time from your date’s house to yours and vice-versa, being in each other’s virtual, non-physical presence no longer has to seem like a lesser experience. Will we reach a point soon where, COVID or not, people start favoring VR and AR opportunities that simulate traditional in-person means of experiencing, well, anything? More sanitary, safer, and generally more flexible and free, this new, less immediately physical age of dating and sexuality could very quickly become the new normal.
Venture Out While Staying Home
Image: AR goggle product concept. (Jaehyun Ha / PDF Haus)
Fewer physical opportunities also mean a greater focus on other parts of seduction and the sexual relationships they may produce. Flirting takes many forms, nonverbal ones being just as powerful as anything facilitated by a phone call. Sharing one’s personality through AR and VR interactions allows for a more natural and less manufactured presentation. Sure, you can customize a VR avatar to show your best side or fix that horrible mistake of a haircut, but you’re also much closer to being able to gesture, move, and react in ways that reveal much about yourself and your partner.
The tech is here, and it’s’s evolving rapidly – especially on the hardware side; AR glasses will soon be almost indistinguishable from your Wayfarers or Aviators – leaving only affordability and infrastructure to really drive home its value. As the implementation of 5G networks gathers speed, we could easily see a radical adoption of AR during this current state of COVID-induced isolation.
Image: If you’re going to #stayhome, you might as well #stayhome with the perfect virtual partner. (Virt-A-Mate)
To AR and VR enthusiasts, these claims of soon-to-be-arriving innovations may seem a bit old hat. After all, we’ve been fantasizing about greater adoption of our favorite tech for years, hoping the world would come around to seeing AR and VR not as gimmicks or ineffective substitutes for reality, but as extensions and expansions of it.
Did Elena write this? BTW I’m for VR, AR is for rich fucks in mansions. If you live in an apartment why would you want to look at your dull apartment? I have a Quest 1, I bought a Quest 2 and sold it to a friend I knew really wanted it for $70 including the better head strap.. The Quest 2 actually is worse but I think it was that Oculus implicated in using slave labor in China lost access to the factories that made the Quest 1 so they had to machine something from shelf-stuff like cellphone screens (the Quest 2 is literally just a cellphone screen in a plastic shell, its not much different than those VR toy sets, only difference is it has 4 IR cameras, and the controllers, which are awkward to hold. The PC Link is awesome, no reason to use a Rift S as its res is the same as a Oculus GO.. The Quest 2 doesn’t have as deep darks as the Quest 1 because the Quest 2 is backlit LCD and the Quest 1 is two square OLED screens, thus variable IPD adjustment that the Quest 2 lacks.. The startup screen on Quest 1 is black with a picture of a asian girl wearing a VR headset. The startup screen for the Quest 2 is two saturated hands against a white backdrop, that has everything to do with the fact that LCD’s have a low intensity grey for black, its not attractive. The Quest 2 also has fewer IR lights than the Quest 1, so if you play beat saber it is less accurate. The only real plusses are the resolution, the 6GB of RAM versus 4GB on the Quest 1, and the faster processor.. But keep in mind the Quest 2 doesn’t use all of its display, and when you increase resolution it demands more processing power, the Quest 2 because the lenses pass over the screen and are not statically glued to the lens cups, the processor must do extra processing to compensate for lens distortion. If you eyes don’t match the three ipd settings on the Quest 2 you will have to settle for lens aberation.. Worse, there is really no choice if you want a Quest unless you can find a Quest 1 being sold on Ebay..
BTW-Insta360 no longer makes the EVO, which is going to reduce the amount of VR porn competitors as it seems to be what all the pornographers are using..
Crazy when you try to wrap your brain around all of this.
Wild times we currently live in. Great post, btw.