(Credit: Lovense)
The Apple Vision Pro launches tomorrow and it's already raising questions about how the $3,499 headset might alter the way humans interact online.
Lovense, a Singapore-based smart sex toy company, integrated its devices with the Vision Pro to create a more "immersive" form of virtual intimacy. The app is geared toward long-distance couples, though the technology seems likely to crop up in other corners of the web. Specifically—you guessed it—porn sites.
Here's how it works: One person equips themselves with a Lovense toy, such as the $200 Solace toy for men, and the other puts on the Vision Pro headset. When the one with the goggles makes "intuitive hand gestures," such as the "grab and shake" (you can guess what that is), the Vision Pro cameras interpret the motions, which triggers the sex toy on the other person to vibrate and move accordingly.
It remains to be seen how many people are willing to pay $3,700 for what amounts to a remote-controlled shake weight (i.e. $3,500 for the headset, plus the $200 toy, in this example). The company did not provide additional examples of hand gestures that might work with its slew of toys for both men and women.
Lovense devices can already be controlled by someone else through a traditional mobile app. But with the Vision Pro app, spatial computing (Apple told app developers not to call it VR) does the same thing in a more natural way.
"The most unique feature of the Apple Vision Pro is that it does not require a control handle," Lovense says. "The cameras built into the headset can fully track user control gestures, which lay the foundation for this integration. Lovense, based on gesture recognition of Apple Vision Pro, has developed customized gesture recognition commands."
Although Lovense is gearing the app towards long distance couples, its toys are also used by online sex workers to "interact" with their viewers during livestreamed video sessions. They wear the Lovense device, which paying viewers can control.
While Apple does not allow porn apps on the Vision Pro, a Steve Jobs-era policy, Business Insider reports, Lovesense is not technically a porn application. However, in this way it could potentially be used as an accompaniment to a desktop-based porn experience that Apple has now elevated with its new headset.
Porn addiction could accelerate with more realistic forms of interaction if products like the Apple Vision Pro become commonplace. Even without this type of next-level spatial computing, the online porn industry remains as controversial, and lucrative, as ever. The average age of first exposure is just 13 years old, the American Psychological Association finds, and several of the top sites across the web are porn sites, according to SemRush.