My friends, the future is here and it costs $3,499. A solution with no discernible problem, the Apple Vision Pro is a highfalutin’ AR headset hammered together in the fires of Cupertino by Tim Cook himself, and social media already abounds with posts from very earnest people trying to tell you it’s totally life-changing and then a lot of other people making fun of them.
Spotted by 404 Media (via Kotaku), VR porn connoisseurs have been alarmed to find that their vast libraries of immersive smut don’t seem to work on their fancy new headsets. In a recent post to the r/OculusNSFW subreddit—which is a very cool website to visit at work—a user named PlzHelpMeMike asked the braintrust if anyone had figured out how to get their VR pornography working on the Vision Pro. The news they received was dire.
“Worse than PSVR2,” reads the top-voted comment in the thread from On-The-Red-Team, “$3,500 chastity belt.” It turns out that—while the Vision Pro can generally play old-fashioned, “flat” pornography just like it can a YouTube video—the headset doesn’t support the 360-degree, braindance-style VR porn experiences that are the only reason I bought this thing in the first place. That they bought it, I mean. What?
The issue is that many VR porn sites aren’t yet kitted out to support WebXR, the API that lets web-based immersive content work in Safari on your headset. After all, there wasn’t really any need to before the Vision Pro’s release. It’s surely just a matter of time, but that’s hardly a balm for those dedicated gooners who have already dropped $3,499 on Apple’s latest toy. For now, users are stuck trading “spatial” porno (basically magic-eye photos) among themselves like samizdat, just like our forefathers of old.
The VR porn community had previously been rather excited about the Vision Pro—one user with tongue firmly in cheek heralded it as a “new frontier of masturbatory technology” the day before it released—but it all went to pieces when users realised just how limited the tech was when it came to their preferred use case. Many are having to turn to old stalwarts like the Meta Quest in order to get their fix, leaving their new $3,499 toy gathering dust.
For those who just can’t wait, user vrpicasso has a solution: “There’s a hack for playing VR files if you have an AVP, it involves restoring it to default factory settings, boxing it up, selling it on eBay, buying a Quest 3 and pocketing the $3000 difference. Let us know if that works.”