Porn industry’s billion-dollar new frontier
Your eyes open to a beautiful woman, scantily clad in red lace lingerie. She bats her eyes flirtatiously, then slowly makes her way over to you.
But this is not a flesh-and-blood woman; it’s a three-dimensional performer in a 360-degree immersive video so convincing you can barely tell the difference. In virtual reality, as nowhere else, donning a pair of clunky goggles allows you to pursue your wildest sexual fantasies, Marketwatch.com says.
For virtual reality to become a viable business, pornography, which tends to rank among any new technology’s earliest and most eager adopters, will need to play a starring role, analysts say.
By 2025, such adult content is forecast to be a $1 billion business, the third-biggest virtual-reality sector, after videogames ($1.4 billion) and NFL-related content ($1.23 billion), according to estimates from Piper Jaffray. It’s the next “mega tech theme” in the U.S., akin to the mobile-phone industry 15 years ago, analyst Gene Munster said.