A ‘$3,500 Chastity Belt’: Early Apple Vision Pro Adopters Alarmed to Learn VR Porn Doesn't Work
A ‘$3,500 Chastity Belt’: Early Apple Vision Pro Adopters Alarmed to Learn VR Porn Doesn't Work
"So uhh.. where is all the 3d porn?"
The general consensus in that thread is that, while the Vision Pro can play "flat" porn videos on sites like PornHub, there is currently not an easy way to play 180 degree side-by-side videos on the Vision Pro, which is how most commercial VR porn is filmed.
Porn aside, doesn't this mean it just can't handle standard video formats?
Judging by how iOS STILL doesn't natively support WebM, I suppose it will never have support outside specific apps.
So fucking annoying to find a good meme and send it on Signal, only to see my friend reply "doesn't play" for the hundredth time.
Fuck Apple.
Kind of? But hot take - their format is actually better for flat content. They seem to want people to use their "spatial video" format which seems like it can be just two videos in a QuickTime or MP4 container. It wouldn't surprise me if you could just use ffmpeg to convert whatever into their format pretty dang quickly. It's actually just MV-HEVC.
Most 3D video right now is one video track with two distorted videos either side by side for flat or 180 content, or top and bottom for most 360 content. It gets encoded and played back as standard flat video and then the player does the splitting and dewarping for the headset (or for flat just correcting the aspect ratio). They don't seem to support doing any of that in their built in player.
Instead, with MV-HEVC, they encode one eye as the "main" video track, and do deltas to get the other eye, giving you way better resolution since you aren't splitting the frame in half, and better efficiency since you aren't encoding essentially the same image twice (theoretically you could have a codec that could couple copy a big chunk of the frame like that but I'm not aware of any that actually do). It also means if you play it back in 2d you just get a normal video instead of a weird distorted mess, and you can swap to the other eye if you player supports multi track video. They also do some clever stuff with captions in 3d too.
It doesn't seem like they support any sort of immersive 3d video (i.e. 180 or 360 degree fov) in their player at all, but I haven't looked at it a ton. I mostly just took a glance at their developer stuff. It seems like a very apple thing to do since 180/360 video is difficult to do right.
This was sort of my thought--just convert and move on.
according to my quick googling, it can play some but not all media files...
The built-in video player doesn't support side-by-side stereoscopic video formats. The title of the article should state that the AVP does not play certain 3D video formats out of the box, making the story about porn is just a weird pivot to generate clicks.
However there is already at least one third party app that plays SBS video just fine. You can also convert SBS video to MV-HEVC, which is arguably a better 3D format, and use the built-in player.
However there is already at least one third party app that plays SBS video just fine.
Which app?
You can also convert SBS video to MV-HEVC, which is arguably a better 3D format, and use the built-in player.
I investigated this and couldn’t find a tool to do this. Which tools have you seen that do this?
No, the article is wrong. I’ve played a bunch of videos, 2D and 3D, and it works fine. The players that launched in the App Store are the issue.
Can't handle a lot of them, yes. In very typical Apple fashion, they're overpricing tech that lacks basic features of its competitors.
that's what I really wondered myself. I understand apps and such, but you can't just play video?
Probably. Whatever standard governs side by side video likely isn't supported in Safari.
As an Index owner, it is simply not fun or convenient to jerk off wearing your VR gear. 3/10 the tech isn't there yet.
I could not disagree more. It’s like I’m actually motor-boating three beautiful women’s massive bosoms at the same time. And it’s like they’re all really sitting on my face. I’m using a Quest though so I’m not sure if there’s a difference. Just make sure you’re using large file sizes. 10GB+.
I find it fine with my Quest 2. Like I’m not gonna replace all masturbating with VR but it’s fun occasionally.
Can’t agree more. It was near the first time, and it was the same time that I realized it’s just not that great when it’s nothing but visual stimuli and no interaction of any sort. I’d enjoy it more if they made it more of a voyeur experience where I could move around the room and watch.
I was just unconformable, trying not to nut on my equipment, and could only operate one boob at a time.
Budget issue I think, it's really not affordable to purchase both a VR headset and a receptacle that's more complex than a fleshlight on a sawhorse.
Oldtimers will remember...
http://www.easylife.org/fufme/index.html
Edit - for the interested, the name was a riff on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CU-SeeMe
You'd still risk lube on your equipment.
For the most part yeah, it's just a novelty. The feeling of presence is pretty cool though, like the sense that someone is standing close to you. I feel like most VR porn is not taking advantage of the medium very well, might be better if it wasn't trying to be an outright sex simulation.
They’re wrong. Download The Archive. Has a built-in video player. You’re welcome.
The Archive
Is that just an AVP app or an actual resource on the web some of us should be aware of?
I like to think is some obscure secret app from the Illuminati that tells you all the secrets...and strangely enough allows to play porn too but that is just a small feature on the side.
So, not just porn but all SBS videos are unsupported?
Someone will make an app.
Apple has never had their own apps focus on supporting non-standard formats. This isn't anything unusual.
Shit, even my shitty old phone in a cardboard headset can play 180 VR videos and this thing can't
Doesn’t Apple tend to be very anti-porn? Not allowed on the App Store, and they tend to have lots of restrictions on the content that apps can show. It seems like you’d have to jailbreak it, which Apple probably makes as difficult as possible.
No porn and general indifference to gaming. The tech is really cool, but I still don't know what this thing is for .
The Apple Watch was the same. “But why do I need it?”
In the business we know that greatness comes from iteration and time. Apple doesn’t give a single shit whether this first release is all that and a bag of chips. In fact I think the crazy pricing is deliberate - to set expectations that this is not a mass market device quite yet and it will take some iteration and development to make it great.
I keep seeing “people won’t buy it because it’s too expensive” listed as a con for this device and I’m just like LOL dude that is the whole point.
This is a Tesla Roadster. Expensive as shit and impractical. Also revolutionary technology and the basis for much more in the future.
I really like the idea of augmented reality workspaces, but I don’t like the idea of waving my hands around at the ghosts in front of me. I just want it to let me click and drag my windows into any area in my vision, but still primarily utilizing a real keyboard or track pad to interact most of the time. I guess I sort of want my laptop or other handheld device to be like a remote control, so there is the visual queue to the people around me that I’m working on the computer and not having a schizophrenic episode.
If you read the article, this has nothing to do with porn.
The built-in video player doesn't support SBS 3D video, but third party apps do.
I remember when this video was brand new…
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Why are journalists today so terrible at their jobs? The entire article is wrong. It's just clickbait. Fuck Jason Koebler
"Freedom from porn" as ol' Steve put it. I'm surprised that Apple users are surprised.
Apple will do what it always has done. All the media players and let the user add whatever content they want. It’s been this was for years on iOS and iPad OS.
There is no shortage of media players that will play nudie vids in codecs that QuickTime doesn’t support out of the box.
It’s a v1 product. Apple is banning VR porn, it just doesn’t have a massive app ecosystem yet. The product is days old and has a small market.
honestly i have an oculus and simply blowing up a standard 16:9 video works perfectly fine
I'm worried that I'm the first person to state that there is a paywall (asking for an e-mail address), and can somebody post the actual article so I can read it.
We don't read the articles. Most of the time it's just some AI generated crap and all the filler is in the headline anyway, or indeed pay/privacy-walled off like this one.
Here's a free one though.
https://kotaku.com/apple-vision-pro-vr-price-porn-nsfw-1851227294
Thank you.
The kotaku article points out this is just an initial compatibility issue:
404 Media points out that Apple started supporting WebXR (an application programming interface (API) used for VR and AR devices) on its in-house browser Safari back in 2022, and the Vision Pro supposedly supports that API. But perhaps there aren’t too many VR porn app makers optimizing vids for the less popular browser.
So give it a few weeks, VR porn fans. Redditors have already reported some success in rejigging the advanced Safari settings on their Vision Pro, and, as 404 reports, one person “has been downloading WebXR clips and converting them into formats that can be played through the Vision Pro’s Files app and is sharing them on a dedicated Discord.” Though the videos are reportedly not that great (there are issues with the aspect ratio and with clips not feeling like a proper 180-degree fuckfest), VR porn beggars cannot be VR porn choosers.
Autostereoscopic displays are the future. No more stinking wearables
Does it play other 3d movies? According to the part of the article I could read before the paywall it sounds like the other headsets handle porn just fine
I wish i could get a good article into what porn games i can play in VR because that is the shit i want so bad.
The click gesture really gets in the way. Not that I would know.
we shouldn't allow the manufacturers to have nay control over how we use the things they sell us. it's a $3500 borked headset.
hot take from a guy with zero reading comprehension
I bet this will help Quest sales.
Hahaha cry harder fanboys