3D Slides: The VR Porn Of The 1950s
Are you a fan of VR porn movies? My sense is that virtual reality porn has been slower to “take off” than its promoters have hoped, but if you search with Google for “VR Porn” (or even just do a quick search here at vPorn Blog) it quickly becomes clear: the headsets are getting better, the experience is becoming more realistic and immersive, and fans are flocking to buy and view porn in this new 3D interactive format. The rise of VR porn may not have been quite as fast as producers hoped, but this wave of innovation is far from over!
In all the excitement about VR porn videos, though, it’s easy to make the mistake of thinking VR porn is new. And, I guess, that’s technically true, if we’re only talking about motion pictures. But if you include static 3D images, this is at least the third wave of commercially successful VR porn.
The first wave was in the 19th century. As early as the 1850s, people were selling commercially successful viewers (called stereoscopes) designed to let you view two photos at the same time of the same scene from slightly different perspectives, creating the illusion of a three-dimensional scene:
And it didn’t take long at all for pornographers to start making highly popular sets of stereoscopic cards with sexy scenes on them:
Stereoscopic porn was very popular and sold extremely well. But it was, mostly, in black-and-white. (Very high-end stuff might be individually hand-tinted with watercolors by a skilled touch-up artist, but that was not mass-producible.) And so the VR porn industry languished for a hundred years, until the invention of the Stereo Realist color 3D camera in the late 1940s. Suddenly stereograms could be mass produced in brilliant color! Needless to say, pornographers were all over that shit. VR porn was back with a vengeance, baby!
Any aficionado of vintage porn will know about Irving Klaw, who sold mail order porn photos (most famously of Betty Page) out of a basement in New York City from 1938 through the 1950s. His black and white kinky and cheesecake porn photo sets with white borders are famous and easy to find on the internet even today.
Less well known, though, is that Klaw sold every kind of pornography through his mail order catalogs, including what his advertising called “3D Color Stereo Slides” on every imaginable pinup and cheesecake topic. Nor was he the only one! You could find advertising for these updated color stereograms in the back pages of any men’s magazine in those days. There were many producers, although topics were usually soft core to avoid obscenity prosecutions or trouble with the postal inspectors.
The “Realistic” color 3D stereo slides were a lot more versatile than the old black and white stereo cards of the 1950s. There was a high quality plastic viewer machine for looking privately at the slides, as well as projection systems for projecting the stereo images onto a viewing surface. So successful and popular was this method of porn distribution that it was still in commercial use through the 1980s.
VR porn is deed very awesome. And it has been for at least 170 years!
