Today, you decide, you're a teenage dyke rather than an older bear into bondage, a plushy fancier, or a lover of cat girls. Slipping into the erotic persona of your choice, you tiptoe nonchalantly into the appropriate fetish room at the 24-hour sex club.
Are you embarrassed to admit an interest in taboo topics? Worried you'll run into your boss? Afraid to get naked in front of a bunch of strangers?
Nah. You're still at home, smutting it up VRML-style at virtual sex club XRave, opening its doors for business 12 February. The libidinous maze of fetish-targeted chat alcoves, naughty images, sound effects, and adult stories is the first 3-D virtual world to exclusively target adult users with sybaritic intentions.
CEO Caroline White says the creators of XRave at Berkeley Interactive Design wanted to create a world that invites users to safely try on identities and play with their sexuality.
"We set out to undermine the dominant paradigm of the porn industry, to redefine its terms and reclaim them," she explains. "We wanted to create a 3-D Web space for erotic play that is more compelling than the traditional sex industry with its 'Girls! Girls! Girls!' aesthetic."
XRave is an experiment both in role-playing and in the virtual reality modeling language or VRML.
Although highly touted as the killer app that would turn 2-D HTML Web communities into lifelike and absorbing 3-D experiences, designers have been slow to exploit VRML technology. Since VRML 1.0's release in May 1995, VRML experiments intended to entice profits, such as Mark Pesce's VRML animation shop, blitcom, have mostly crashed and burned.
These days, the language has been subverted by technologies like Java and Shockwave and is mostly used as a demonstration of Web designers' or gamers' programming talents. Most Web users aren't even aware that later versions of Navigator and Explorer have built-in VRML support because they've never had any reason to wonder.
"It's a Catch-22," White says. "VRML hasn't captured the public attention as quickly as expected because there's not much compelling content created. And there's no content because of the expense and difficulty of creating a large-scale VRML project until the technology has been widely embraced." The relative lack of knowledge and support for VRML is one of XRave's biggest hurdles. Visitors who want to enter XRave must first download the Cosmo Player 2.1 VRML plug-in and have recent or current versions of Netscape Navigator
"This is so confusing!" howls San Francisco S&M scenester Borgia when confronted with the console for XRave's fetish rave for the first time. "I want it to be like cybersex gone wild, but I can't figure out what I'm doing and it seems slow."
White acknowledges that system and browser conflicts -- and the need to download a separate plug-in -- will discourage some potential users, but she thinks XRave's content is compelling enough to be worth the hassle.
David Razza, New York technology assessment consultant and XRave user, says the site is unique both online and in the physical world.
"Even before the Web, sexual minorities and those with a taste for fetish have been using the network to meet people with similar tastes," he says. "They used email, Usenet, and, more recently, met through MUDs and MOOs. This site takes it up the next level. You can connect with those who are interested in what you like, no matter how unusual, and have a space to enjoy your interests."
Those who pay entrance fees, ranging from US$9.95 for 24 hours of access to $199.95 for a year, are granted access to the main dome. From there, they can explore main raves -- straight, gay, dyke, and fetish -- and explore rooms in each rave devoted to various erotic specialties with each containing images, sounds, and fellow patrons interested in that activity.
Visitors can view the images, chat up other room denizens, or access the erotic literature library that matches their fetish. All the while, users are surrounded by XRave's original trance sounds and other sound effects created for the situations being viewed, like whip cracks in the bondage nook or tremulous moans in the "Like a Virgin" room.
"Today maybe you feel like being into S&M," White says. "Depending on what alcove you go into under that broad category, you may go into constraints, extreme practices, electrical stimulation, auto-asphyxiation.
"In this postmodern era, all of us are evolving and forming our identities. We offer an immersive environment where you can assume a life unlike no other life you've ever led. XRave is all created for you. The only missing piece is your character."
