Abstract
Virtual reality (VR) media using a three-dimensional (3D) camera facilitates an immersive experience compared to traditional two-dimensional (2D) formats. In this novel study, we used high quality, women-centered erotica and examined whether stimulus modality (VR vs. 2D) and point of view (POV: first-person vs. third-person) impacted women’s feelings of sexual presence (activation of sexual response induced by the perception of being present), sexual arousal, and sexual desire (dyadic and solitary). We also investigated the effects of stimulus modality on feelings of general presence (a sense of “being there”). Results from 38 women indicated that with medium to large effects, general presence, sexual presence, and sexual arousal were significantly higher for VR videos relative to 2D videos. Sexual presence was higher for first-person POV depending on the order of film exposure. A general trend toward increasing dyadic sexual desire over the course of the study was observed. No significant differences were observed for solitary sexual desire. These findings support the adaptability of VR media to sex research and show that it can induce feelings of sexual presence and presence more generally. That sexual arousal was positively impacted by VR erotica may have implications for addressing the limitations that accompany other stimulus modalities used to elicit sexual responses in women.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Availability of Data and Material
The experiment reported in this article was not formally preregistered. All analyzed data are available on the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/umvnw/?view_only=b65824c0935b498bb77f5e21fed3f023).
References
Baños, R. M., Botella, C., Alcañiz, M., Liaño, V., Guerrero, B., & Rey, B. (2004). Immersion and emotion: Their impact on the sense of presence. Cyberpsychology & Behavior, 7(6), 734–741. https://doi.org/10.1089/cpb.2004.7.734
Baños, R. M., Botella, C., Rubió, I., Quero, S., García-Palacios, A., & Alcañiz, M. (2008). Presence and emotions in virtual environments: The influence of stereoscopy. Cyberpsychology & Behavior, 11(1), 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1089/cpb.2007.9936
Benjamini, Y., & Hochberg, Y. (1995). Controlling the false discovery rate: A practical and powerful approach to multiple testing. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series B, Methodological, 57(1), 289–300. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2517-6161.1995.tb02031.x
Benjamini, Y., & Yekutieli, D. (2001). The control of the false discovery rate in multiple testing under dependency. Annals of Statistics, 29(4), 1165–1188. https://doi.org/10.1214/aos/1013699998
Bohil, C. J., Alicea, B., & Biocca, F. A. (2011). Virtual reality in neuroscience research and therapy. Nature Reviews. Neuroscience, 12(12), 752–762. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn3122
Both, S., Laan, E., & Everaerd, W. (2011). Focusing “hot” or focusing “cool”: Attentional mechanisms in sexual arousal in men and women. Journal of Sexual Medicine, 8(1), 167–179. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1743-6109.2010.02051.x
Botoon, J. (2015, July 26). Porn industry’s billion-dollar new frontier. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/how-the-future-of-virtual-reality-depends-on-porn-2015-07-15
Chivers, M. L. (2005). A brief review and discussion of sex differences in the specificity of sexual arousal. Sexual and Relationship Therapy, 20(4), 377–390. https://doi.org/10.1080/14681990500238802
Cummings, J. J., & Bailenson, J. N. (2016). How immersive is enough? A meta-analysis of the effect of immersive technology on user presence. Media Psychology, 19(2), 272–309. https://doi.org/10.1080/15213269.2015.1015740
Dawson, S. J., & Chivers, M. L. (2014). Gender-specificity of solitary and dyadic sexual desire among gynephilic and androphilic women and men. Journal of Sexual Medicine, 11(4), 980–994. https://doi.org/10.1111/jsm.12430
Dores, A. R., Almeida, I., Barbosa, F., Castelo-Branco, M., Monteiro, L., Reis, M., de Sousa, L., & Caldas, A. C. (2013). Effects of emotional valence and three-dimensionality of visual stimuli on brain activation: An fMRI study. NeuroRehabilitation, 33(4), 505–512. https://doi.org/10.3233/NRE-130987
Duane A., & Gurrin, C. (2020). Baseline analysis of a conventional and virtual reality lifelog retrieval system. In Y. M. Ro, W.-H. Cheng, J. Kim, W.-T. Chu, P. Cui, J.-W. Choi, M.-C. Hu, & W. De Neve (Eds.), MultiMedia modeling (pp. 412–423). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37734-2_34
Elsey, J. W. B., van Andel, K., Kater, R. B., Reints, I. M., & Spiering, M. (2019). The impact of virtual reality versus 2D pornography on sexual arousal and presence. Computers in Human Behavior, 97, 35–43. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2019.02.031
Everaerd, W. (1989). Commentary on sex research: Sex as an emotion. Journal of Psychology & Human Sexuality, 1(2), 3–15.
Fromberger, P., Meyer, S., Kempf, C., Jordan, K., & Müller, J. L. (2015). Virtual viewing time: The relationship between presence and sexual interest in androphilic and gynephilic men. PLoS ONE, 10(5), e0127156. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0127156
Glickman, M. E., Rao, S. R., & Schultz, M. R. (2014). False discovery rate control is a recommended alternative to Bonferroni-type adjustments in health studies. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, 67(8), 850–857. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclinepi.2014.03.012
Gorini, A., Griez, E., Petrova, A., & Riva, G. (2010). Assessment of the emotional responses produced by exposure to real food, virtual food and photographs of food in patients affected by eating disorders. Annals of General Psychiatry, 9(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/1744-859X-9-30
Heiman, J. R., & Rowland, D. L. (1983). Affective and physiological sexual response patterns: The effects of instructions on sexually functional and dysfunctional men. Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 27(2), 105–116.
Huberman, J. S., Dawson, S. J., & Chivers, M. L. (2017). Examining the time course of genital and subjective sexual responses in women and men with concurrent plethysmography and thermography. Biological Psychology, 129, 359–369. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsycho.2017.09.006
Janssen, E., Carpenter, D., & Graham, C. A. (2003). Selecting films for sex research: Gender differences in erotic film preference. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 32(3), 243–251. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1023413617648
Kim, K., Rosenthal, M. Z., Zielinski, D. J., & Brady, R. (2014). Effects of virtual environment platforms on emotional responses. Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine, 113(3), 882–893. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cmpb.2013.12.024
Laan, E., & Both, S. (2008). What makes women experience desire? Feminism & Psychology, 18(4), 505–514. https://doi.org/10.1177/0959353508095533
Laan, E., Everaerd, W., van Bellen, G., & Hanewald, G. (1994). Women’s sexual and emotional responses to male- and female-produced erotica. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 23(2), 153–169. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf01542096
Lafortune, D., Dion, L., & Renaud, P. (2020). Virtual reality and sex therapy: Future directions for clinical research. Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, 46(1), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/0092623X.2019.1623357
Lessiter, J., Freeman, J., Keogh, E., & Davidoff, J. (2001). A cross-media presence questionnaire: The ITC-Sense of Presence Inventory. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 10(3), 282–297.
McDonald, J. H. (2014). Handbook of biological statistics (3rd ed.). Sparky House Publishing.
Mosher, D. L. (1980). A three dimensional theory of depth of involvement in human sexual response. Journal of Sex Research, 16, 1–42.
Mosher, D. L., Barton-Henry, M., & Green, S. E. (1988). Subjective sexual arousal and involvement: Development of multiple indicators. Journal of Sex Research, 25(3), 412–425. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224498809551471
Mosher, D. L., & MacIan, P. (1994). College men and women respond to X-rated videos intended for male or female audiences: Gender and sexual scripts. Journal of Sex Research, 31(2), 99–113. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499409551736
Renaud, P., Neveu, S. M., Rouleau, J. L., & Joyal, C. (2016). Sexual presence: A qEEG analysis of sexual arousal to synthetic pornography. International Journal of Telepresence. Retrieved from https://ijtelepresence.org/1-3/.
Renaud, P., Trottier, D., Nolet, K., Rouleau, J. L., Goyette, M., & Bouchard, S. (2014). Sexual self-regulation and cognitive absorption as factors of sexual response toward virtual characters. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 17(4), 241–247. https://doi.org/10.1089/cyber.2013.0165
Rieger, G., Cash, B. M., Merrill, S. M., Jones-Rounds, J., Dharmavaram, S. M., & Savin-Williams, R. C. (2015). Sexual arousal: The correspondence of eyes and genitals. Biological Psychology, 104, 56–64. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsycho.2014.11.009
Rubin, P. (2018). Coming attraction: The rise of VR porn. Retrieved August 14, 2020, from https://www.wired.com/story/coming-attractions-the-rise-of-vr-porn/
Schubert, T., Friedmann, F., & Regenbrecht, H. (2001). The experience of presence: Factor analytic insights. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 10(3), 266–281. https://doi.org/10.1162/105474601300343603
Schuemie, M., Van der Straaten, P., Krijn, M., & Van der Mast, C. (2001). Research on presence in virtual reality: A survey. Cyberpsychology & Behavior, 4(2), 183–201. https://doi.org/10.1089/109493101300117884
Simon, S. C., & Greitemeyer, T. (2019). The impact of immersion on the perception of pornography: A virtual reality study. Computers in Human Behavior, 93, 141–148. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2018.12.018
Strassberg, D. S., & Lowe, K. (1995). Volunteer bias in sexuality research. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 24(4), 369–382. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf01541853
Toates, F. (2009). An integrative theoretical framework for understanding sexual motivation, arousal, and behavior. Journal of Sex Research, 46(2–3), 168–193. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224490902747768
Witmer, B. G., & Singer, M. J. (1998). Measuring presence in virtual environments: A presence questionnaire. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 7(3), 225–240.https://doi.org/10.1162/105474698565686
Wood, M., Wood, G., & Balaam, M. (2017). They're just tixel pits, man. In G. Mark, S. Fussell, C. Lampe, M. C. Schraefel, J. P. Hourcade, & C. Appert, (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI '17 (pp. 5439–5451). ACM Press. https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025762
Yekutieli, D., & Benjamini, Y. (1999). Resampling-based false discovery rate controlling multiple test procedures for correlated test statistics. Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference, 82(1), 171–196. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0378-3758(99)00041-5
Acknowledgements
We wish to thank our research assistants Julia Bradshaw, Jasmeen Mohammed, and Isha Rajvanshi for their assistance throughout the project.
Funding
The authors did not receive any funds, grants, or other supports for this study.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflicts of interest
All authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
Ethical Approval
The University of British Columbia Behavioural Research Ethics Board approved all procedures for this study.
Informed Consent
Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Milani, S., Jabs, F., Brown, N.B. et al. Virtual Reality Erotica: Exploring General Presence, Sexual Presence, Sexual Arousal, and Sexual Desire in Women. Arch Sex Behav 51, 565–576 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-021-02111-8
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-021-02111-8