Can virtual reality get you to pay for porn again?

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"It's like you can reach out and touch them," porn actress Brett Rossi says of VR porn. Max Taves/CNET

Anna Lee has worked in the adult entertainment industry for 18 years, trying on everything from the webcam business to a fantasy role-play site. Her most ambitious project yet: virtual reality.
Last year, Lee's company, HoloFilm Productions of Vancouver, British Columbia, started using specialized cameras that capture 360 degrees of action so viewers who strap on a pair of goggles and a screen to their face feel like they've actually stepped onto the set.
"It's the next progression of everything entertainment," Lee says in a convention hall crowded with porn studios and sex toy companies at the Las Vegas Hard Rock Hotel, where the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo is taking place. "And, of course, with porn, now you're with your favorite porn star, sitting in the room with her. She's looking at you, she's talking to you."
HoloGirlsVR.com, the website featuring Lee's initial 60 VR porn scenes, launched Tuesday. It features stars like Cherie DeVille who are doing a lot more than talking.

"It's so detailed that you can see a freckle on your ass."

Brett Rossi, porn actress

Welcome to the future of porn.
The tech industry has become VR obsessed, with new products about to arrive like Facebook's high-end $600 Oculus Rift headset and Sony's so-far unpriced PlayStation VR. Google is already there, with its roughly $20 Cardboard VR headsets that offer a cheap alternative by using your smartphone. While these devices are marketed primarily as game machines, the porn industry sees them as a way to get skin to your eyes and money out of your pants.
"It's like you can reach out and touch them, that's how close they are to you," says Brett Rossi, an ex-fiancee of TV star Charlie Sheen and a longtime porn actress who appears in Lee's new VR videos. "It's so detailed that you can see a freckle on your ass."

Whipping it into shape

You'd think with all the porn out there -- it rakes in $3.3 billion a year -- the industry wouldn't need another way to bring it to you, but you'd be surprised.
Porn revenue is basically stagnant. IBIS World, a research firm, projects online porn revenue will increase by less than 1 percent every year between now and 2020. That's despite a recent University of Texas study indicating 46 percent of men and 16 percent of women between 18 and 39 years old watch porn every week.

Porn goes deep with virtu