For the three guys looking to score at a dark sports bar about an hour outside Las Vegas, it’s a buyer’s market.
There’s a stripper pole, a pool table and three TVs mounted above the bar. One is playing “Law & Order.” The other two display a slideshow of women flashing come-hither looks. “Paloma here through January 25,” reads one frame, followed by “Cassie here through January 24.”
The three men miss the advertising, though. They’re focused on a dozen women in skin-tight clothes and high heels.
This is the scene at Sheri’s Ranch, a legal brothel in Pahrump, Nevada, a town of 40,000 at the base of jagged peaks near the California border. I’m here on a Friday afternoon after spending a week in and around Las Vegas, learning how technology is changing our sex lives.
Based on what I’ve seen, this much is clear: The world’s oldest profession is under attack from the newest.
Jeremy Lemur, a skinny, bald man who’s been the spokesman for Sheri’s for three years, said hype and increasing investment in virtual reality began to worry him late last year. VR displays video through screens that strap to your face and create lifelike scenes — think video games, political debates and, yes, porn — to put you in the center of the action.
“What if they could duplicate sex via the Internet?” says Lemur, who’s seated on a couch with a leopard-print throw in the Safari room, one of the Ranch’s five “VIP” bungalows. They sport themes like King Arthur’s Court, Arabian Nights, Ancient Rome and the 1960s, the latter enlivening a popular bungalow that was occupied during my visit.
If simulated sex becomes too realistic, Lemur wonders whether VR might just drive Sheri’s, which has been around for about three decades, out of business. “This is serious,” he tells me.
The adult industry’s embrace of virtual reality and Internet-connected toys mean porn is getting more and more lifelike. Will there be room for the real thing?
Source: How sex tech could threaten the world’s oldest profession – CNET