We’re hearing a lot of buzz lately about how excited users of Second Life are that the game may be fully supported using Oculus Rift. It seems fairly evident know that Oculus and Second Life are really a match made in heaven. When I first tried Second Life, although I enjoyed the virtual world, I really felt like the feeling of immersion was missing. This was well before the Rift was announced and now that it’s available, although we haven’t received ours yet, I’m excited by the possibilities.
A video posted on the Second Life YouTube page showing recent updates and improvements ends with a guy playing Second Life with an Oculus and the words “Virtual Reality headset support, coming soon“. The video was only just posted on September 26th.
The company can clearly see that the way to bring back the original popularity of the game is to make it as immersive as possible.
I remember the first time I played Second Life a few years ago I wanted to try to find a place to mingle with other users. I actually found it difficult to find a place where there was anyone to communicate with. Other however then the “sex hangouts”. If a big portion of SL users already use the game for sexual activities adding Oculus Rift support will only make it better for them.
I wonder however if they will be a direct competitor to games like 3DX chat that are really trying to capture the role playing voyeur virtual reality niche. The big challenge for SL it seems is that it was never developed with Oculus in mind and therefore may have to step back a little to catch up with companies like SexGameDevil that have produced these sex games specifically for Oculus from the ground up.
Although opening up these games to virtual reality sex interactions will really only become mainstream once developers can truly integrate the visual modules with tactile peripherals which allows the gamer (user) to feel the actions as well as experience them visually.
It does feel like we’re a far ways off from this being available, but considering the demand for such an experience it may be here sooner than we expect. So much of the potential of these games for sex applications will depend on 3rd party developers and sex “hardware” manufacturers. Larger development companies like Linden Lab main not necessarily target the sex and porn demand as it doesn’t necessarily align with their planning and expansion goals, hence the reason why 3rd party mods are so important. This is one of the reasons why the potential VR headset from Sony for the PS4 will most likely not have any future sex games. Sony, although they don’t develop, is simply not in the business of running implicit games.
The global demand for virtual sex experiences is simply too gigantic for many of these developers to ignore. And for those that do not face any real barriers to entering this market the reward is potentially great. There will be however many failures on the way to the top before someone finally develops a game that is acceptable to the masses. And when that happens it will surely change only porn forever.
