Virtual character creation isn’t new. The other day my partner created an avatar for his Xbox game that looks like an elf version of me.

He could tweak everything from the shape of the eyebrows to the curve of the nose.

This technology has made the user experience in video games that little bit more personal. As with all good things, though, it’s also found its way into porn.

VICE looked into the world of virtual reality porn, where people are spending money to create 3D avatars of their exes and/or celebrities who they then “interact with” in virtual reality.

On forums like Reddit, marketplaces like Patreon, and on standalone websites, communities of anonymous users are making, selling, and getting off to the computer-generated likenesses of celebrities and other real people. The 3D models that emerge from these communities can be articulated into any position, animated, modified, interacted with in real time, and manipulated in ways that defy the constraints of physical reality.

The program isn’t as sophisticated as the nonconsensual deepfake porn that was doing the rounds, but it’s still a little creepy.

“I use it to fulfill my sexual fantasies or replicate sexual encounters with my ex-girlfriends,” one user commented on a subreddit dedicated to creating 3D adult content with Virt-A-Mate (also known as VaM), software for creating adult VR games and simulations.

The user was specifically talking about Foto2Vam, a program that uses a photograph of a real person’s face to automatically generate a 3D model with the same face, which can then be used in VR.

“Foto2vam has enabled me to literally feel like I’m there again, i.e. getting a handjob/footjob from my ex looking at me with a smile, or having another ex ride me on the floor in reverse cowgirl in front of a mirror…the possibilities are endless,” the user said.

“From now on, we need to make sure we ask girlfriends to pose a few different angles with a blank expression and flat lighting for a few photos and then import them into VaM,” they said. “Oh, and I find it amusing to alter reality and give them boob implants, etc. ;)”

While there’s nothing inherently wrong with 3D porn, the problem with VaM and the community around it, including the 7 600 members of its active subreddit, is that they make it relatively easy to create a 3D model that looks like someone who exists in the real world and share it with others.

Once those avatars are out there, it’s possible to do just about anything to them, including torture:

The most popular avatars are of celebrities, because it’s easy to get high-quality images of them online.

Motherboard has found dozens of 3D models of celebrities including Emilia Clarke, Natalie Portman, Emma Watson, and Nicki Minaj—most under nicknames, per the rules. The celebrities are recognizable on sight, and sometimes their fake name alluded to their real name, or their identity is referred to in user comments. Almost all the 3D models we saw were of women, but we spotted at least two 3D models of men: Joaquin Phoenix and Chris Pratt.

Studies have shown that women are the most common targets of nonconsensual porn, and abusive, manipulated imagery like deepfakes.

Experts and victims agree that even if it’s not “real,” the experience of seeing one’s likeness in nonconsensual porn spread across the internet results in legitimate trauma, similar to sexual assault, and not very different from actual revenge porn or spreading sex tapes and nudes without consent.

At this stage, technology is moving faster than the law.

Read the full VICE report for more on virtual porn.

[source:vice]