Apple Vision Pro, the massive tech company’s foray into the VR headset space that hit stores just a few days ago, is very expensive. It’s an impressive piece of tech (hence the price tag) that you can use for working from home (by virtually pinning windows all over your house—take that, return-to-office mandates!), going in-depth into the hottest VR-capable games like Resident Evil 4, or watching sports games complete with real-time stat updates. But one thing you can’t do with the Apple Vision Pro is watch VR porn, and fans of scintillating smut are not happy about that.
As reported by 404 Media, the VR porn community quickly realized that their favorite kind of content won’t work on the headset. In a Reddit post on the r/oculusnsfw subreddit, one user asked if anyone had “figured out porn on the Vision Pro?” “Dying to get this to work haha,” the post reads. “If anyone has a success story please tell me how.” The top-voted comment doesn’t mince words: “worse than PSVR2. $3500 chastity belt [clown emojis].”
“There’s a hack for playing VR files if you have an AVP,” writes another commenter. “It involves restoring it to default factory settings, boxing it up, selling it on eBay, buying a Quest 3 and pocketing the $3000 difference. Let us know if that works.”
Because the Apple Vision Pro allows you to use web browsers and place them virtually in the real world, you can still navigate to PornHub and watch as many regular (or “flat”) porn videos as you’d like. But VR porn, which is often shot and viewable in 180 degrees, cannot play on the Apple Vision Pro—something VR porn enthusiasts have longed for since the device was announced. The day before Apple Vision Pro’s February 2 release date, an r/VisionPro post titled “My last night suffering” reads:
An ode to my last night suffering with being able to see the space between the pixels on my Meta Quest 3 while trying to watch VR porn, breaking my otherwise pristine immersive experience. Tomorrow ushers in a new frontier of masturbatory technology. It could be a population growth turning point for humanity if it is good enough.
Unfortunately, travel to the “new frontier of masturbatory technology” appears to be on hold. As 404 points out, the same person hoping for that new frontier then founded the r/applevisionnsfw subreddit. Though it’s not surprising that VR porn apps are not available on the headset (the late Steve Jobs said in 2010 that those who wanted porn apps on their phone should “buy an Android”), what is surprising is that none of the, I’m sure, enterprising young men trying to watch VR porn have figured out a workaround yet. 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.