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The Guy Who Invented Pop-Up Ads Is Making a Virtual Reality Strip Club

Brian Shuster just keeps giving and giving.
​Image: Utherverse

I feel as though I should say straight away that I've never been to a strip club. Well, a physical one, anyway. Every time the idea of visiting a gentleman's club has been floated by a Busch-soaked bro during a boozy night out in the meatspace, the mental imagery of sticky floors and faint off-putting odors, as well as the thought of sticking a bill in a lady's underwear as lecherous men look on (I have no idea if this actually happens, but you get my drift), turned me off of the plan.

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But could virtual reality change the entire strip club game?

Brian Shuster, the man they call the "prince of pop-ups" for inventing the pop-up ad during the heady days of the 90s internet, thinks so. His company, Utherverse, is about to release an Oculus Rift-ready version of the company's online red-light district, Red Light Center (RLC), which first launched as a more traditional MMO in 2006. The Oculus Rift version will be launched on January 21st with a public demo free to download.

"Virtual reality can improve upon the advantages of real-world interactions, and mitigate the drawbacks," Shuster told me. "With online porn, you get to pick out of hundreds of thousands of men or women and find the one that turns you on the most. And let's face it, there's much less of a social barrier and it's easier to talk and interact with people." "At the end of the day, it's a huge turn on to go to a virtual strip club—to see the realism of the avatars and to know that there are real people behind them," Shuster continued.

Watching the Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas-looking avatars grind and fuck in RLC (I tried the desktop version) didn't exactly turn me on, but it could just be that I was viewing them in mere 2D. As for virtual reality, forget the technological sublime, Shuster makes it sound more like carnal ecstasy.

Right now, RLC is a thriving virtual community. Some users start their own clubs and brothels, while others merely frequent them for digital lap dances and quickies. The women and men who work at RLC are real, too. Working for third party companies, they log in, register with a bot stage manager, and perform virtual strip teases and sex acts for Rays, the currency of the online world, which can be cashed in for real money.

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In virtual reality, Shuster told me, users will be able to do all this and more. While the patrons strap on an Oculus Rift and wander around a virtual sexual wonderland, fulfilling every seedy desire, would a woman or man be on the other end, staring into the virtual world with the same hardware? "Exactly," Shuster said.

But the pleasures of the virtual reality RLC won't be confined to mere optics—Shuster told me that his company is also looking into integrating haptic touch technology to make it feel real.

Haptic devices use robots synced up to a virtual reality display, in this case, to make your actions in a game feel real. Motherboard's own Brian Merchant demoed—well, not fully—a haptic sex device created by Tenga, a Japanese company, that jacks you off while you bone a video game character. Merchant thought it was really weird and totally un-sexy, but Shuster made it all sound almost sweet.

"There's going to be haptics that don't just stimulate the genitals, although they will do that really well," Shuster said. "Users are going to want to dance, they're going to want to kiss and hold hands. Right now it seems a little bit gross to make out with a haptic device, but in five years it might not, when every little brush of the lips is translated to your partner and when they flick their tongue and it gets translated to you."

Adorable, right? Well, maybe at some point in the future. I really don't know what is more off-putting to me—the idea of a real strip club or a virtual one where a robot grabs my dick, but I know which of the two is more intriguing, even if neither is particularly arousing.