Hi I'm Jeroen, Pioneer in the field of Erotic Virtual Reality & (ex)Co-Founder of Sinful Robot. AMA!

how much better would your thing be than jerking it?

If you want a quick release, this is not for you. This won't ever replace xtube and sorts. But if you want to have a totally unique and intens highly erotic experience instead of watching other people have sex, then you should try this :)

Is it something like romancing the love interests in the mass effect series?

Yes, but this time without any censoring :)

Is the uncanny valley a big hurdle in creating these virtual reality experiences?

Quoting my Lead Animator for this reply :

"Creating believable humans is (IMO) that hardest problem in all of computer graphics. There are features films with tens of millions of dollars to spend on this problem that fall short. We have to achieve similar results at 60 frames a second or the user will be distracted. We are under no disillusions that we will be indistinguishable from reality. However, with a lot of hard work and a little luck, we will be good enough that its not distracting. We are targeting the absolute highest end scanning and motion capture systems and we have secured the employ of experts in the field. If we fall short, it wont be because we didn't know what we were doing."

Any hope of seeing games aimed at straight women?

Definitely. One of the reasons why most woman prefer erotic stories (50 shades) over watching porn is because they get more excited about the thought then about watching something.

Now, in VR you are not "watching" anything, you are EXPERIENCING everything. This is a monumental difference that is very hard to explain to people who never experienced VR :)

Will you possibly have a multiplayer mode, where people shoot lasers out of their cock?

If enough people want it, We'll make it happen :p

Verified.

Allrighty, so what do I do now? lol :)

Answer this: what's the next step for your company?

a) Finish prototype b) Put Rift running prototype on investor's head c) Blow investors socks off d) ???? e) Profit!

Do you believe in promoting all sexual fantasies? Including violent ones?

Everybody has kinky fantasies, but not everone is in a situation to make them reality. I think Virtual Reality can fill that gap, and I'm sure a couple of years from now we will have every fetish imaginable crafted in VR, but that's not our goal. We want to craft exciting erotic adventures that a broad audience can enjoy.

Any lesbian porn that'll actually be made for lesbians? Most of it these days is just straight women pleasuring straight women for the viewing of straight men.

Long term I want to do this, but I'll need to hire people who exactly know how to do this. I do not :)

Do you envision a live couple version? Two humans who are physically engaged in RL sexual activity, augmented by VR. Sorry if I'm not properly expressing my question.

I'm trying to fully understand your question here, but if I understand correctly you are for example thinking of a couple who has a threesome fantasy, both going into the VR and experience the threesome toghether inside the VR? If that's your question then I'm afraid that's not gonna happen any time soon, since we would need very low latency full body tracking sensors to make this happen in a believable way. One day it will happen, but it will take a while to get right. Experiencing threesomes with just you IRL and 2 virtual characters? We will offer that in 2014. It's just the multiplayer aspect that makes it a lot more difficult to pull off.

I believe AbCynthia956 was suggesting a scenario without any virtual characters at all, but simply allow a couple to use VR to augment or change each others' appearance and possibly the environment for more immersive roleplaying or costume play.

Would this be easier to implement than a multiplayer scenario which does involve a virtual character, or would the same (or more) difficulties apply?

No the addition of the virtual 3th person is the easy part, it's getting the 2 "real persons" interacting with each other in VR in a realistic way : that is pretty hard to accomplish with current tech. But I'm convinced that one day it will be perfectly possible.

Set up a kickstarter man, I would fund it.

I can't , Kickstarter doesn't allow for adult themed projects :(

I'm not a PC gamer so can youvwalkvus through what this would be like? Do you manipulate the "character" with the keyboard? I get the immersion with oculus, but what would the controls if you will be like?

We are looking into various control schemes. It became apparent very quickly that standard gaming controls just don't cut it (mouse/keyb or gamepad). But there are some wonderful devices out there that are pointing us in the right direction such as the Razor Hydra, the Leapmotion Sensor and Future Microsoft Kinect style full body trackers. Also we are investigating how to integrate voice recognition as an input device, very exciting stuff!

Hey Jeroen, thanks for the AMA. Can you link to some examples of what the characters look like? I wanted to see them ... for ... science?

"We are going for hyper realism using a technique called "digital doubles" where you basically make a digital copy of a person, animate it using advanced motion capture and import it into the game engine. We are a big fan of Lee Perry-Smith's work. Here is a good example of his work : http://vimeo.com/61550389"

What positive impacts will your product have on society? Could this technology development be used for other things to better society?

I think so, I'm immediately thinking about people with disabilities, who often really struggle to have a very exciting sex-life. For them, this could be a wonderful addition to their life.

• So the mental picture I have of this thing is that I enter a VR booth(?), put on a headset (audio+video) and go to town. Is my understanding correct?

• Have you thought about incorporating the ... um... experience into other senses such as smell and touch? What is the extent of work in this direction?

edit: to add a question that came up when my friends and I were drunk beyond reason, because why not:

• What do you think about the pervasiveness of AI sex in the future (I'm thinking 50-100 years ahead)? Do you think we will have robots that humans can have relations with (a la Bladerunner)? Do you think the next wave of sexual rights campaigns after LBGT will have to do with AI/robots?

That's not what we have in mind but I do like the idea of a VR booth hehe :p Our version works best on a gaming pc and an Oculus Rift, you just launch our software, put on the HMD and headphones and enjoy the ride ;-)

Smell & Touch: we are about to enter the first phase of virtual reality for consumers. But there are already devices out there that offer (basic) touch feedback such as the RealTouch and the Vstroker. Those are not perfect, but at least it's a start!

Blade runner is one of my favorite movies, so yeah obviously the thought of having fully functional "recreational" sex robots is pretty mind blowing, but those will probably be a long way off lol :)

Oh jesus. I just saw this, along with that RealTouch thing mentioned elsewhere and now you are here to do an AMA. Trippy.

Question: did you find out why the other guy suddenly decided to pull the rug out form under you?

I'm not sure to be honest, it came as a total shock to everyone involved. But it's best I just let it go and move on.

So, if I may presume to ask, why are you making this? It's really not condescending, I just would think you have a few interesting reasons :p

Well I'm gonna be honest there, I've been living a pretty hedonistic lifestyle since I was 26 when I was with a, let's say, 'very adventurous" girlfriend lol :) Many of my friends said I should write a book about my life but I can't write lol.

So to this day i'm really enjoying this lifestyle But I was always thinking about how awesome it would be to craft these type of adventurex into VR experiences so everyone could enjoy them.

I'm very passionate about VR as well as Erotica, so this project makes total sense to me :D

So is this still like watching porn just not off your computer? I don't really understand how this works. Can you help me?

Ok, imagine watching the series TV series Californication. Now you are watching Hank Moody having all those wild adventures and you are thinking to yourself: "damn! I wish I was Hank Moody!" Well, Imagine going into a virtual reality where you are Hank Moody.

The beauty of the Oculus Rift is that it tricks your brain into believing the virtual reality IS reality, so you are really convinced you are in another place, with other people, doing other things. You are not watching anything, you are inside something. HUGE difference.

I love the idea of what you are doing. Do you plan on having more then one human participant in the future?

Hell yeah! That's the ultimate goal. I'm a huge huge fan of Ernest Cline's "Ready Player One" novel, so just the idea of having an adult themed OASIS is something that I'm very passionate about.

Have you evet personally experienced a lucid dream? It is pretty much virtual reality in a dream but you are conciliatory during it. I've experienced some crazy shit (yes sexually with very hot girls from memory or that are projects of my imagination.) If you could duplicate lucid dreaming your business would be unlimited.

I have experienced lucid dreaming, I was very into it at one point and had a dream log on my nightstand. Every morning when I woke up I would write down my dreams before I forgot them and after a while I started to have light lucid dreams. It's pretty amazing actually but it's kind of hard to achieve for most people.

VR is a lot easier, you only need to know how to click a desktop icon lol

Hello, Jeroen, I'm excited and intrigued to learn about your work.

If you can pull it off you'll be world famous. Can you give us a ballpark estimate on when we'll be banging computer programs in the matrix?

First generation Erotic VR : 2014 :)

So is there any worry that VR sex will become so good that people will basically stop having kids?

Lol I have zero worries about that :D It's like asking if I would prefer to drive a real rally car or play Colin Mc'Rae . Real > VR :)

Did you play a lot of Leisure Suit Larry growing up?

I LOOOOOOVED Leisure suit larry! I literally spent my teenage years working trough all the Larry adventures, mind you : that was before the internet so peeping at a walk trough was pretty much impossible. Man I miss those days :) (BTW my favorite was Leisure Suit Larry III !)

What is your response to critics who might claim that this type of product impetsonalizes an otherwise intimate act and further perpetuates violent sexual behavior?

I don't see why our product would promote violent sexual behaviour but in answer to your other question: VR erotica will never be as good as the real thing, but for many people it will open up a whole world of very exciting sexual fantasies that they are, for some reason, unable to pursue in real life.

im just going to leave this here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&v=0MP_G6arpVI&NR=1

lol? :D

Have you considered doing a kickstarter or something similar? Judging from Reddit response, you should be able to fund this through donations honestly rather than relying on other parties.

I considered kickstarter but they don't allow adult themed projects. However, I found out today that Indiegogo might allow it so I already pinged them to make sure & investigate further. I love the crowd-funding concept : As far as I remember I'm backer #20 for the Oculus Rift devkit, I'm pretty stoked to see them take off like they did! :)

Did you guys make the post on /r/technology that made the front page?

No, I woke up this morning with a txt from a friend who said "wake up, you are on the frontpage of reddit". Great way of waking up lol

Hi, how was it working at pokerstars?

To be honest I think PokerStars is one of the best companies to work for: they really really try their hardest to make their employees happy. But Poker was never my passion so once I saw Palmer's kickstarter project kick off I realized it was time to take my Erotic VR dream to the next level!

What programs do you and your team use to develop these things? Also, do you see a possibility of a "multiplayer"? Thanks for the AMA!

Again quoting my lead animator for this reply :

"For the content (characters, animation and environments) we will be using Maya. However, its worth noting that will be scanning real actors and motion capturing them. So, we will also be using programs like AgiSoft, Vicon Blade and MotionBuilder. Our rendering engine is proprietary and its shaping up to be one of the best I've seen. This is because the game isn’t held back by complex physics, AI, path finding, complex environments, lots of characters, collision, etc. Most all of the horse power is put into the two hero characters. Our sub surface approximations and surface deformations are at the absolute highest end of whats possible on real-time hardware. I wish I could show you. This whole reddit explosion came about 30 days too soon."

Was your marketing team behind the r/technology thread?

I wish I had a marketing team!

You've been doing a good job exploiting Reddit as an advertising platform over the last couple days, but all I see is sizzle, no steak. I could promise to be producing the next big thing. But I'd be lying. Shouldn't you wait til after you've accomplished something to do an AMA? Also, did anyone ever tell you that history confers titles like "pioneer", and bestowing it upon yourself makes you look like a douche?

I didn't initiate any of this. I woke up this morning to a message from a friend telling me I'm on the front page of Reddit. Needless to say my day has been pretty hectic since then lol. All I can do is prove it to you, we will hopefully be pushing out our demo later this year.