Business Punk Cover Story #1/2018 “The Virtual Brothel: This Startup wants to realize the perfect Illusion in VR Sex”
The Virtual Brothel: This Startup wants to realize the perfect Illusion in VR Sex
Published on 27/02/2018, written by Julian Daum & Nikita Teryosh, translated by me.mento 3D manufacture GmbH
A permanently kept semi-dark office in the basement of a red brick building, somewhere in the nothingness of Berlin’s north. A 30-year-old designer is sitting in front of two large screens. On the wall behind him are drawn storyboards and photos of a naked lolling woman. With his mouse, the man scrolls up and down and replays a small, half-finished animated sequence back and forth. The silhouettes of the woman’s face from the storyboards move, still slightly angular. Back and forth, back and forth. The graphic artist stops: The color shading of her tongue is not yet perfect when it moves in the half-open mouth. The French kiss that the sequence is supposed to show just doesn’t look real yet.
On the screens of the other workplaces, basically the same scenario takes place, only with other body parts. Hands, knees, breasts. Back and forth, back and forth.
Link: Here we go behind the scenes of the virtual Reeperbahn.
These details, says Tobias Platte, who stands behind his colleague, represented the biggest challenge in animating naked bodies. Extreme close-ups of mouths, breasts, even genitals. 16 employees are currently working hard in his 3D sex startup me.mento and another 23 as freelancers, says Platte. Up until now, his company has earned its money by printing detailed 3D figures of porn stars. To date, Memento has made more than 600,000 euros in sales. Quite decent, but far too little to enter the world of VR pornography. So, he set off and raised EUR 3.5 million from private investors. Money that is now being invested in the construction of a complex VR erotic park, the success or failure of which will ultimately determine the answer to a question: How do you, realistically animate a vulva and a penis during sex in a virtual space? So how do you make sure that customers get so horny that they are willing to pay money for services — and not, as with most of today’s VR porn providers, soon lose their desire over jerky animated genitals?
„GTA “with an overdose of Sex
Computers and sex, that’s an old theme. For decades, cybersex has been regarded as the big, dirty promise of digitizing all areas of life. But so far it has been somewhat boring, at least in the mainstream gaming area, from “Leisure Suit Larry” in the 80’s to the barbie breasts of “Lara Croft” in the 90’s to the hidden puffs in “Grand Theft Auto”. Sex was portrayed in these games as more of a fun than sensual option. That’s exactly what Platte wants to change.
He has big plans: The Memento team is working on a sex game of unknown dimensions, a virtual Reeperbahn, called “vrXcity” where sex avatars live. These are digital copies of real porn actors. In “vrXcity” they become prostitutes, callboys and strippers available to players in sex shops, strip clubs, hourly hotels and erotic cinemas.
On Platte’s sin mile one should be able to move unhindered as in “GTA”. Only with VR glasses, in 3D and much, much more sex. Memento is not the first one to experiment in this area — as apps like VRtitties, La Douche or SinVR also offer animated sex with VR glasses. But the images on these apps are very pixelated and the interaction is limited.
Platte is tall, slim and very casual: dressed in a check shirt with his hairless dog Gypsy on his arm. He trained as a banker, and at the end of the 1990s he joined the marketing industry before becoming the COO of a large 3D printing company. Their business model: to produce licensed 3 D fan figures of real stars and comic figures. But Platte saw another business opportunity in the 3D printing of bodies: sex. So, he founded Memento in 2014 and began manufacturing figurines from porn stars.
Punk porn star Bonnie Rotten, the Grande Dame of the German hardcore scene Vivian Schmitt, the American anal queen Asa Akira — are all here. A figure of 13 centimeters costs around 70 euros. At that time, a special scanner was developed for the 3D models of the porn stars: equipped with just under 150 SLR cameras and 4,500 LED lights to illuminate all possible angles of a body and capture all body surfaces. The whole process, simply explained: pure model, sexy pose, scan, 3D printing, finishing and painting by hand.
That was quite nice, „says Platte today. “But not really scalable. We asked ourselves, so what else can you do with the 3D data?” The VR sector was exploding in the meantime with the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive’s eyeglasses on display at every trade fair. It wouldn’t be the first time that sex would become the main driver of a new technology.
It is said that the porn industry helped to make JVC’s VHS cassette the resounding success it was in the 70s, while competitor Sony dug their own grave by banning erotic content on its Betamax medium.
Shops for real companies
Platte’s plan reminds one of another sex-heavy online world, realized 15 years ago with the revolution of the Internet: Second Life. Similarly, in the Sin city of “vrXcity” users can stroll around with their own avatars. Platte also wants to rent out virtual spaces to real companies, on which they can, for example, commercially lease virtual office space, open a sex shop or operate an hourly hotel. Users could then use the sex shop to buy a virtual dildo by an in-app purchase, to be used in a virtual brothel with one of the avatars from Mementos’s catalogue of more than 600 actors and performers. Actresses, for example, like the amateur porn actress Texas Patti, who warmly welcomes the user into her room.
A few weeks ago, Texas Patti was at a motion capturing studio for Memento. In a black bodysuit with sensors and cables, she sat on the erect penis of a fellow porn star and moved her ass up and down. All movements were recorded and digitized, so that the sex, which the user can later see using the VR glasses, appears as realistic as possible. What other motion capturing studio can boast of their actors actually engaging in the activity they want to illustrate? Other characters developed using mocap like Gollum or Lord Voldemort was only done using artificial methods. In vrXcity the sex is real.
First star of “vrXcity”
Texas Patti, whose real name is Bettina Habig, is not just a woman on whose tongue,
breasts and buttocks the designers of Memento work on today. She is a former dental assistant, who became a businesswoman in the erotic industry, became a self-made porn producer and is one of the first stars to be scanned for vrXcity. She is the face of the project. Even though there is probably not much more that could surprise her sexually, as she gets into Mememto’s scan box she starts to laugh.
Habig’s long, black hair hides her breasts, she stretches out her arms, poses between the cameras and can’t keep a serious face, because the situation is absurd. Theoretically, once digitized, there are no limitations on how many times your avatar can be reproduced.
Theoretically, she could soon be having sex with an unlimited number of men. Simultaneously. If only just virtually.
The more difficult part of the work to get to that point, is still however to be done by the designers with the animations for running, dancing and erotic poses. It gets complicated when it comes to making sure that the pelvic bones don’t break through the skin in the rider position or that the corner of the mouth does not become distorted shortly before orgasm. Also, the tongue play is not yet quite smooth.
Although the photorealistic 3D VR porn world is still just a prototype and the Beta version of “vrXcity” has only just begun, Platte and his colleagues are already thinking ahead. At some point there will be a worldwide network of whole-body scanners enabling users to upload copies of their own avatars onto the platform.
Cooperation with manufacturers of sex toys is being pushed. Possible examples are masturbators that react to what’s going on in the game, or full-body suits that take the player’s body into account. The goal is the perfect illusion. There is also the designated currency, redBUX, which will be used to pay for virtual sex in the future.
It is not so easy to say what this will look like exactly. The very nature of the interactivity on vrXcity raises some ethical and philosophical questions: What can and are users allowed to do with the digital images of real actors? While many people in the real world find it difficult to recognize sex workers, will they accept that they are buying an illusion, a fantasy and not buying the person him/herself?
What is perceived online as a funny slap and where is the line drawn for rough sex? Where does the abuse of power or sadistic violence begin? And can one even speak of abuse of game characters?
Texas Patti says, “That’s strange, of course, but I just might not care. It’s just my avatar.” But she does not feel completely disconnected from her digital copy either. “I find it interesting to see myself from this perspective.” And up to a certain point, she lets her avatar do a lot. However: “We talked about it. And I said: Not that some guy is sitting there someday and says, ‘I’m going to punch you in the teeth and beat you — and then I’ll rape you’. “
Faced with questions about such ethical boundaries, Platte beckons. Of course we thought about it already. There will be rules to the game, moderation and programmed action limits. It is precisely defined, with which avatar a user could do exactly what. In other words, the possibility of beating someone up — which in some pornos may well be part of the staging — is not given in “vrXcity”. It is not programmed and therefore not visualized.
No children brothel in dark server corners
On the other hand, the question of how to deal with the creativity of users is quite concrete. The attraction of “Second Life” is that not only are the players very free to design their avatars, they can also design the platform. This creates the very real danger that someone builds a mod in a dark, secluded server corner and programs a children brothel there for himself and his pedophile buddies. Exactly this is one of the reasons why modding will not be possible like in “Second Life”, says Platte. Although there will be certain tools to personalize his gaming experience — such as your own avatar. But the source code of the platform remains secret. “Everything that has anything to do with children or animals will not happen”, says Platte.
But he has to deal with other urgent matters as well. For example, that at the start as a 3D printing provider it was not foreseeable that this would result in a VR business. So Memento had to renegotiate the necessary licenses of all scanned porn actresses and performers. Then you have to work hard on the product. Of the planned sex city is not even a shell. The promo simulation is visually impressive, but still somewhat edgy animated. And the interactive possibilities that will eventually come to pass are still quite limited at the moment: a naked woman is striding towards the player in front of a living room catalog background, laying back in front of him and spreading her legs. Next to it are two or three dildos, ready to be picked up and used on the controllers. This simulation, which may be shown to visitors, however, reflects a somewhat outdated state, Platte assures. It is technically and visually much further.
At the end of January, Platte unveiled his concept at the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas, the largest erotic show in the US, which is the largest porn and sex trade show in the world. The interest of the trade visitors was there. But before the vision becomes reality and “vrXcity” will be available on the Steam distribution platform as a fully functional open-world game, Platte’s designers will have to run many more breasts, butts and tongues back and forth across their screens. But after decades of being on the level of a pixelated party gag, the old promise is finally fulfilled. VR sex is getting real.
