A clever and effective way to enjoy immersive adult entertainment.

As anyone who has tried to watch adult VR videos can attest, one of the biggest things that breaks the immersion, and thereby the pleasure, is the issue of control.

A hands-free dream

Sure, some virtual reality rigs, such as the high-end Oculus Rift or the HTC Vive, come with sophisticated handheld controllers that can interact with VR videos effectively, allowing users to pause, rewind, or skip forward to their heart’s content.

Similarly, some smartphone-based rigs, like Samsung’s Gear VR, come with Bluetooth-enabled controllers that can do what the big rigs can. However, this is often without the same degree of interactivity. Even other smartphone options for VR, like Google Cardboard, can be paired with handheld components that are sold separately, but with the same limitations—if not more.

The problem is when they are used to view adult videos. Without going into too much detail, think of it this way: the one thing you don’t want to have to do when watching a VR porn vid is keep one hand occupied with a controller.

Seeing a solution

Fortunately, BaDoinkVR [NSFW] has a solution. Already one of the leaders in adult VR entertainment, its new mobile site now offers Theater Mode: a way of controlling its streamed VR videos using just your eyes.

Already a feature on other smartphone-based VR videos, the system is so effective for VR porn it begs the question: why hasn’t it been used before?

Eyes on with Theater Mode

To access it, you simply have to log in to the BaDoinkVR site (after becoming a paid member) joining with your smartphone of choice (Cardboard, Daydream, or Gear VR).Then select VR THEATER under a pulldown at the upper left of the site.

Once it’s selected, you are transported to a rather posh living room where there are six hovering thumbnails. There are also buttons to the side that bring up many others for various almost half-hour-long adult VR videos.

The selection is pretty standard when it comes to adult entertainment, but the content is not really what’s exciting here. By selecting the miniature VR headset icon on the lower right, you can then pick out your preferred smartphone rig. It seems to have several dozen options available. Once that’s done, all you need to do it turn your head to cause a cursor on the screen to land on the video of your choice.

Once it fires up—more on that in a second—you can then enjoy the content. But here’s where things get really nifty. If you want to rewind or skip forward, just lower your head until you see a rather tiny grid icon. Holding your cursor there brings up a comfortably standard video control menu where you can skip the video back or forward, or just back to return you to the home screen.

A few bugs to work out

Using a—let’s say very affordable—plastic version of the Google Cardboard rig and my iPhone 6s, I was able to easily get into and control all of the videos I selected. There were, however, a few things that kept me from really enjoying the experience.

To be fair, this is a beta system, so no doubt BaDoinkVR [NSFW] will be ironing out the bugs before Theater Mode is formally part of its site. The first quibble is that the control icon in the videos themselves is awfully tiny and easy to miss—and for some reason is positioned way down below the video. Sitting at my desk, I had to drop my chin practically to my chest to access it.

The second is that while I have pretty fast WiFi, the videos took a distractingly long time to load, and then frequently froze or even crashed my smartphone’s browser. Once again, though, this is an early build and more than likely these issues will be addressed in the future.

A great first step

In the end, while there are problems to be ironed out, this type of visual control—particularly for adult videos—is clearly what the world has been waiting for, and BaDoinkVR deserves applause for these first steps.

Image sources: ACEBOY™ MODELS, Olabi Makerspace