Oculus Rift Founder: We're Down with Porn

Oculus VR isn't going to come in between your Oculus Rift headset and virtual reality porn, the company has announced.

Oculus founder and Rift inventor Palmer Luckey stated his position on the matter during a panel at the first Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Conference.

"The Rift is an open platform," Luckey said in response to a question about X-rated content. "We don't control what software can run on it."

According to Variety, representatives from Google's Cardboard VR and Samsung's Gear VR, dodged the question.

Luckey added Oculus being open to all kinds of content is "a big deal," and having porn on the platform can be an advantage. It's too soon to tell if virtual reality will become the bright future of media Oculus and parent company Facebook insist it is, but several huge companies are already competing for a piece of this hypothetical pie.

Sony's headset, Project Morpheus, won't get any pornographic content (at least not officially) because it's designed to work with the PlayStation 4 console, which has a strict policy forbidding what the Entertainment Software Rating Board defines as Adult Only content.

The other big contender in virtual reality, the HTC Vive headset, uses technology made by gaming company Valve, which already released its OpenVR software development kit, meaning people can already develop pornogrophic content.

The role pornography played in deciding the format wars between Betamax and VHS or HD DVD and Blu-ray is exaggerated, and porn alone isn't likely to decide the race between virtual reality devices, but it's still a good indicator of where early adopters are headed. If there's a bunch of porn being made and consumed on one or more of these platforms, the least you can say is that there's a user base there.

As you can imagine, several adult entertainment companies are already experimenting with virtual reality. To name just a few examples, Japanese sex toy maker Tenga is making a kind of robot arm you can bone for more immersive virtual reality experiences, and Chathouse 3D is like World of Warcraft…in which you bone other avatars in virtual reality.

The allure of virtual reality porn is obvious, but as virtual reality pioneer Jacki Morie told Motherboard recently, so far it's mostly just a titillating idea. "You'd have to show me someone who made a good pornographic VR," Morie said. "I've never seen such a thing."