Vision Summit 2016: first public demo of Permission VR. Natacha Merritt diary #7

VR Permission Natacha Merrit diary 7

By Fabien

Its complicated how it happened but at the first night’s socializing reception I was asked to show some of my sensual Virtual Reality content at Vision Summit. Minor panic gave way to a hunt.

Luckily I had packed my Dk2 and Gear VR, then we borrowed another girl's Gear VR and ran to buy more headphones, and into Victoria Secret for our new haptic inputs: silk lingerie. Turns out that Victorias Secret doesn’t have real silk. So the three of us spent a good thirty minutes with our eyes closed touching slips and panties to see how close we could come. This is in Hollywood, so the tall dry and slender blond barely noticed the odd behavior which is what's so wonderful in a land where content creation is king. We chose complex silk and lace underwear for the DK2 experience and a slip for the Gear VR. We headed back upstairs, and through a thick haze of virtual and augmented reality buzzwords: scene editor, streaming, presence, MVP, frame rate, latency, immersion, empathy, space exploration. The most recurrent word was the classic: "storytelling". This one was the one I heard with the most fervor. I poped into a post mortem about the year in cinematic VR where the speaker listed all the drivers of VR all the while never mentioning porn. I never heard about sensuality or arousal. Porn was mentioned as an afterthought and never on a stage.  
Vision+summit+2016 Natacha Merritt Permission VR
So here we are, 3 women (we were barely 5% of the 1400 attended), one tall black french girl with a pink top, one buffed beauty with a silver mohawk and me with a monster truck t-shirt, red lipstick and a bondage bracelet riding the escalator back up to the conference, in 80 degree heat with a purse full of fake silk lingerie and a suitcase stuffed with equipment. We had a little sign, "Permission VR". Courtney ran up to the room and rolled down our room service table from last night, blue swirl pattern on the wrinkle proof table cloth, grease stains and all. With determination and a racing heart we picked the spot with the most traffic and set up. We kept an air of confidence and batted away any one who dared question our set up. We started to show our erotic demo. Only one man ran away when he heard it was erotic. We showed it to 30+ attendees. One man seemed so blown away after being in the experience where he was masturbating in the body of a woman. He thanked me for the discovery and his eyes were teary. I felt a release in some of them. They were all so happy to discuss arousal and art and frame rates and optimization. All were respectful professional and polite. After awhile I lost my timidity and let the Gear VR users float in the hallway with their lingerie in hand. I completely forgot it was Courtney and I in one of the pieces - and no one mentioned it.   Natacha Merritt© 2015. All rights reserved.
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