Whatever Happened to 3D Porn?

It has become a truism that porn tends to lead the way when it comes to technology. I don’t know if that was true in days gone by, but at least since the advent of the world wide web pornographers have been constantly forging new ground in uses of technology. In a way they’ve become victims of their own success because it’s so easy to get porn on the internet for free that they’re having trouble figuring out how to get people to pay for it, but that’s a topic for another post (and I’ve already written a bit on the topic anyway).

So it’s no surprise that any time people think about 3D television and movies their thoughts immediately go to porn: When are the porn producers going to start putting out 3D movies? What are they going to do with 3D that producers of non-porn content won’t have thought of? But as it stands the pornographers don’t seem to be jumping on 3D any faster than Hollywood studios are. Sure, sometimes you’ll see a movie coming out of Hollywood in 3D (or IMAX), and similarly you’ll sometimes see porn being produced in 3D (though I doubt there is any IMAX porn – wait, I take that back (sort of)), but it’s not taking off in porn any more than it is in Hollywood.

Does it bug anyone that I keep using this “porn vs. Hollywood” dichotomy even though most porn probably comes from Hollywood? I hope not, because I’ll keep doing it, and you’ll all continue to know what I mean.

When the topic of 3D porn is raised I’m sure a lot of people get a mental image of cocks and breasts flying at them, and, depending on their personal preferences, that image might be a scary one or an arousing one. Hell, anyone who was raised on SCTV probably gets a mental image of 3D porn that causes them to giggle uncontrollably.

However, when I was first introduced to big budget 3D movies I realized that 3D doesn’t work that way in Hollywood movies – you’re not constantly getting things thrust at you through the screen, it’s more a matter of additional depth to the movie – so why would we expect porn to work that way? As I saw it put in a recent Slate article:

Could [overly blatant uses of the technology] be the place where 3-D porn went wrong? According to the eww-theory of its recent failure, no one wants to see negative parallax in a sex scene. At a porn industry event in 2012, one executive worried that “the things that can come at you are the things that a male viewer does not want coming at them.” Indeed, the major 3-D porn releases of recent years have been somewhat conservative in their use of the technology. There’s very little pop-out in This Ain’t Ghostbusters or This Ain’t Avatar, in fact. “They’re mainly using 3-D to increase the depth of field, kind of like the real Avatar,” says Gram Ponante. “It’s being done in a non-exploitative way, which is strange for porn.”

Strange for porn, maybe, but not strange for 3D in general. The overuse of the technology to have things popping out of the screen is always going to be a temptation at the beginning, but filmmakers (both of the porn and non-porn variety) quickly realize that that’s just a gimmick. The more breathtaking use of the technology is when you’re watching a scene and you get totally immersed in it because the snow that’s falling is falling all around you. Something so subtle that you might not even notice it if you’re not looking for it; anyone working in special effects will tell you that they’ve done their best work when you don’t even think about it, it’s just a seamless part of the movie, and I’m sure that’s the case for 3D filmmaking too.

And maybe that’s why 3D isn’t taking off in porn. We don’t watch porn to get immersed in the story, we watch porn to see sexy people fucking.